Journals of a Pandemic: a project recording life in COVID-19

The bulk of the archive comprises the diary entries submitted by participants to the Journals of a Pandemic project. There are written contributions in three languages (predominantly in English, some entries in French and Spanish) by over 70 diarists documenting their experiences during the initial COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020 and over the following months. Diary entries were originally submitted to a website via an online submission form. When the project ended the diary entries were downloaded from the website by the project curators and stored in Microsoft Word Document files. Two diarists submitted image-based material and two others submitted audio entires. There is also a moleskin volume containing diary entries written by the contributor Phillip Dickinson.

The archive also includes some working files around the management of the project, including a selection of correspondence and email ‘directives’, briefs used in the project, screenshots of website and social media, agendas of project meetings and two short videos recorded in Victoria Park, London by Gayan Samarasinghe for social media output.

March 2020-May 2021

1 file, 15 digital items 691 MB (691473075 bytes)

Acquired in 2021. The digital material was transferred on a hard drive and then copied to secure storage.

Journals of a Pandemic was set up in April 2020 as a collective writing project gathering personal impressions and experiences of life in COVID-19; the project wound up in November 2020. The project was open to anyone to submit diary entries, with specific efforts made to source lesser-heard voices via the communities and networks of the project leads, and through social media connections. This included working with unions; migrants; those with disabilities; NHS workers; sex workers; prisoners; activists; precarious workers; writers, artists and performers.

Diarists were encouraged to write entries describing any aspect of their day, from more mundane details, to mental health, emotions, sex life and everything in between. Participants were able to contribute as little or as often as they wanted and were also welcomed to submit any photographs, artworks or other media.

There were over 70 participants in the study and approximately 200 contributions were made by these participants. Some contributors included a short bio (or 'portrait') summarising who they are, some were submitted entirely anonymously.

The project was developed and curated by:

Ana Baeza Ruiz: researcher, writer and curator, lecturer at the University of Bristol in visual arts and cultural heritage, and Research Associate on the project 'Feminist Art Making Histories' at Loughborough University. She previously worked at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (Middlesex University), the Victoria and Albert Museum and University College London. She is interested in radical approaches to teaching and works across feminism and decoloniality.

Gayan Samarasinghe: barrister and writer. He has written for Private Eye and the Independent on disability, misuse of police powers, and the welfare-state. As a lawyer he worked for several years on behalf of children and adolescents in the British prison system, and now works as a family lawyer.

Marcus Gilroy-Ware: researcher and writer at the intersection of media, culture, psychology and politics. He is senior lecturer at UWE Bristol and author of Filling the Void Emotion, Capitalism and Social Media (2017) and After the Fact? Fake News, Global Elites and Information in the Age of Extremes.

Terry Craven: writer and painter. He co-founded Desperate Literature Bookshop, Madrid.

Copyright is retained by individual contributors (diarists) and Journals of a Pandemic. Wellcome has been granted permission to make digitial copies available under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike licence.

Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files were removed during the automated ingest process.

Originally hosted online at www.journalsofapandemic.org; website nominated for archiving by UK Web Archive. Diary entries downloaded from the website by the project creators and subsequently donated to Wellcome Collection as Microsoft Word Documents.