Journals of a Pandemic digital written submissions

70 Word document files comprising the written diary entries submitted by Journals of a Pandemic contributors. The majority are in English, though some are in Spanish and one is in French. Contributors write from a variety of countries, including the UK, USA, Spain, Beligum, Italy, China, India and Sri Lanka.

Some contributors write about their daily experiences during the pandemic, others provide commentary on the pandemic's national or global impact and governments' actions. Several entries talk about the death of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter movement. A a number of contributors are high school students from the USA and their entries share a structure. In the first phase, participants write standard diary entries. In the second phase, which seems to have begun towards the end of April 2020, participants are given prompts to help with their entries, such as writing a letter to their past self just before the pandemic began and to reflect on changes to their personal relationships. They are also given articles to read and videos to watch and reflect on.

The project made specific efforts to source lesser-heard voices via the communities and networks of the project leads, and through social media connections. Thus contributors include disability campaigners, a former prisoner, sex workers, poets and a member of the traveller community.

The Word documents were created in February 2021.The date given above is the date range of the original diary entries.

One document contains sensitive information and has been catalogued separately as SA/PAN/1/1a and closed.

March-December 2020

70 document files 1.52 MB (1602540 bytes)

All entries from one contributor are stored together in a single Word Document. The files are named with the date of the first entry and the name under which the contributor submitted the entry. In some cases this is their real name, in others it is a pseudonym.

The diary entries were originally uploaded to the Journals of a Pandemic website by each contributor. When the project ended the diary entries were downloaded from the website by the project curators and stored in Microsoft Word Document files. They were subsequently donated to Wellcome Collection in this format.

Copyright is retained by each contributor. Wellcome has been granted permission to make digitial copies available under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike licence.