As you prepare syllabi and course activities, or are looking for your own next research project, we wanted to let you know of a unique new resource for visual analysis and communication studies.
The OIDA Image Collection (https://images.oida-resources.jhu.edu/) highlights more than 6,700 images (and counting) extracted from documents created by the opioid industry. As the U.S. continues to grapple with the impacts of the opioid crisis, these cartoons, advertisements, infographics and photos offer an unprecedented look at how opioids and their effects were represented or misrepresented to patients and prescribers, and more broadly, how the drug crisis was imagined and perpetuated by the industry while it unfolded.
These images and their metadata are primed for investigation as a data set (https://data.oida-resources.jhu.edu/oida_image_collection) and have potential for explorations across disciplines in visual analysis, information literacy, rhetoric, technical writing, data visualization, and more.
Feel free to contact archivist Amanda Norman (anorma11) for more information about the OIDA Image Collection and the UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive (https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/opioids/).
Amanda Keys Norman (She/Her/Hers)
Sr. Archivist | Epidemiology
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Johns Hopkins University