Historical Exigence in COVID-19 Diaries

Arizona State University’s COVID-19 archive project Journal of the Plague Year (JOTPY) called upon the general public to submit texts and digital content about the COVID-19 pandemic, during the pandemic, telling users to “Imagine… what future historians might need to write about and understand this historical moment” (JOTPY, “What We Do”). Its earliest records were uploaded on 15 March 2020, though they can contain media created prior to that date. Records can be (and are) uploaded to this day. Many contributors began writing diaries to be uploaded, and some who were already writing diaries shared their pandemic-related entries.

A shared feature of the JOTPY diaries, resulting from the archive’s mission, is the writers’ historical exigence and imagined audiences. As José van Dijck points out, diary-writers have always considered their work having an audience, such as their future self, a deity, or their posterity. Diary writing, he notes, is like all writing in that it constitutes a form of communication (121). In the JOTPY diaries, the authors clearly imagined an audience of historians, and their exigence was preserving their memory for that audience specifically. This led to the writers making decisions that provide historians with information they could use to better triangulate diary events with historical events, providing a snapshot of the information they had access to in a timeline. In this paper, I will discuss JOTPY’s history and use and briefly the historical significance of diaries. I will then present and analyze examples of diaries in JOTPY and finally demonstrate a methodology for using diaries in JOTPY and similar archives for historical research.

Journal of the Plague Year: History and Practice

On 20 January 2020, the evidence of the first US case of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (later named COVID-19) was found in Washington state. By the end of January, human-to-human spread was recorded, and by mid-March, many states began lockdown measures as world-wide cases climbed to over 100 thousand (CDC, “Timeline”). Around the same time in March, JOTPY began work collecting crowd-sourced digital materials from the public regarding the pandemic. The construction of so-called rapid response crisis archives is precedented, and JOTPY curators took inspiration from previous archives created in the aftermath of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Boston Marathon Bombing (Tebeau 202).

Their goal was to not only preserve a historical record of the pandemic, but also serve as a learning tool for introducing archiving to students and educators (JOTPY, “What We Do”). As a result, many of the entries were uploaded by students and represent the experience of student-aged people. JOTPY was indeed introduced into multiple classroom activities. Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Cheryl Jiménez Frei incorporated contributing and learning from JOTPY into her curriculum by assigning an “un-essay” where students could document their pandemic experiment using their chosen medium. The assignment, Frei finds, allowed students to have hands-on practice in the importance of primary sources in historical work. As of 2021, she plans to incorporate JOTPY and crowd-sourced archival work, including oral histories, in future classes (Frei and Carlson 258). Shane Carlson, as student of Frei’s and now a highschool teacher, argues for using JOTPY and crowd-sourced archives in K-12 classrooms as well. He believes that writing, archiving, and reading personal experiences of historical events makes the pedagogical value clear to the students: “Teachers don’t need to mask learning when students understand the content is relevant, and student archivists may be too engrossed… to realize they are acquiring lifelong critical thinking skills” (264). Using crowd-sourced archives can make historical exigence obvious to students, make them feel a part of history, and provide meaningful contributions to the historical record.

The project curators included ASU graduate student interns who were taught archival skills, which curator and graduate student Erin Craft considers a “community of practice,” or a group centered around a shared goal of learning. She considers JOTPY a rapid-response archive, or one that is created for an on-going event, while still also taking ethical and academic concerns into account (268). These concerns included, as JOTPY curators list in the archive’s NCPH Roundtable, racism (especially Sinophobia), disinformation, consent, and censuring identifiable information. For example, a middle-schooler uploaded a short paragraph entry for a school project, which portrayed biologically impossible and racist explanations for the origins of COVID. This entry was kept in the archive, though marked for containing offensive content (JOTPY, “NCPH Peer Review Roundtable”). JOTPY describes a review process for potentially offensive content, though does not outline the exact nature of this process. It’s likely the fact that the entry was uploaded as a school project affected their decision. This shows a conflict between their goal of preserving pandemic history and the crowd-sourced nature of the archive.

Further addressing concerns found across archives, JOTPY partnered with many organizations representing minority communities to gather artifacts reflecting their unique pandemic experiences, communities which were often affected by COVID at statistically higher rates (Tebeau 202). Ultimately, JOTPY aimed to be a way for everyone involved in the historical process to react in real-time and ultimately learn from it.

The Role of Diaries

Diaries are discrete records of memory over time, often written by one person only, but van Dijck argues that diaries still constitute a form of communication. Rebecca Steinitz further emphasizes that the genre is structured by its relation to memory. She believes diaries are defined by their recording of the then-present, in the present, without much mediation of time and interpretation. She writes that reading someone’s diary allows one to experience a sort of “in their shoes” account of the past with an authenticity not always found in other historical documents, and turn one person’s memory into a collective history (52). Steinitz’s belief that diaries aren’t heavily mediated by time and interpretation contradicts van Dijck’s notion that they are communicative. By being a medium for written communication, diary-writing is mediated by the author’s conscious or unconscious decisions about what to communicate and how it should appear to an imagined audience. Imagining addressing an audience is, according to van Dijck, crucial to the genre, whether the author writes for an imaginary friend, future self, higher power, or any other addressee. A diary’s audience impacts its content, in addition to its exigence.

Philippe Lejeune finds the reason why a person keeps a diary remarkable because diaries are often written by people who otherwise don’t find themselves producing written materials. Through a questionnaire study, he finds that many writers begin diaries after major events to chronicle facts about them and many others choose diaries as a method for self-reflection and self-soothing (34). The reasons for keeping a diary are important to understanding their contents.

Diaries are biased, both in the sense that they only describe the experience of one person and in the sense that they only describe the experiences that person wanted to share. This double-filtering actually makes diaries very useful for historians, as it provides a personal narrative that runs alongside (and sometimes counter to) the broader historical narrative of a time period. Nevertheless, the isolation and narrow focus of diaries can suggest, if the reader isn’t careful, a one-sidedness to history. As with all primary sources, a solution is to read widely and collect from a broad range of people.

Findings from the JOTPY Diaries

To study the diaries collected in JOTPY, I searched for uploaded documents that contained multiple entries from (mostly) consecutive time periods, excluding the many single-day notes. While this most often meant daily logs, some wrote less often, and one source provided only monthly summaries. In total, I found seven artifacts that I considered a diary, though I suspect there are more that aren’t titled or tagged as “diaries.” The JOTPY diaries appear to be mostly written by students or older adults in lockdown—those who had the time and energy to write daily entries during the pandemic. I found no multi-day diaries from writers claiming to be essential workers or sick, though that doesn’t necessarily indicate they are underrepresented in the archive, but instead only in the more intensive diary genre. Appropriately, given the archive’s call for historical exigence, writers often mentioned beginning the diary during the pandemic and in response to the pandemic. Further, some expressed creating their diary for the purpose of later uploading to JOTPY. Only one diary seemed to be an excerpt of a larger project started before the pandemic.

One diary writer, Deborah Swayne of New Jersey, describes her historical exigence explicitly in her archival annotation for her diary upload:

From the beginning, I was aware that this was a world historical event and I wanted to be very attentive to how it played out, both in the news and in my personal life. I read that diaries were scarce in the aftermath of the 1917 pandemic, so it could be useful to scholars to create one this time. (Swayne)

Her aim to be “attentive” in both global and personal events and to be useful to scholars characterizes her diary as having historical exigence. While many primary documents are made for individual events and later found to be useful for historians, Swayne specifically aims to produce a product historians can use. One way she does this is by including features not always found in other diaries, like a glossary of COVID-related terms she learned (like PPE and social distancing) as she learned them and tables of COVID case numbers globally and locally. While triangulation is necessary when reading primary documents to situate them in a historical context, Swayne does some of this work for the reader by keeping track of these factors alongside her personal narrative.

Another diary writer is Julia Fair, a highschooler from Massachusetts, who appears to have excerpted a larger diary and uploaded the pandemic-related entries concentrated in early March 2020 and end in mid-May. It isn’t completely certain if there are entries between the ones uploaded, but she introduces herself in the first entry in a way that makes it seems as though there aren’t any entries before it. Additionally, Fair was the only writer who started their diary without explicitly stating their historical exigence, and she didn’t explicitly mention the potential historical value of her work until her last entry:

I can’t believe that I’m living through a historical event, that I will look back on this in many years, among archived photos and newspaper articles, and have a first-person account of it… I might try to write something and submit it to an online collection of coronavirus memories. I’ve always thought it would be cool to be a primary source. (Fair, 18 May 2020)

Here, Fair situates her contribution into a place alongside other primary sources, in particular using the term “primary source,” which suggests some knowledge of historical work. It’s possible she was participating in one of many school projects incorporating JOTPY. Additionally, using phrases like “I can’t believe” and the final sentence about aspiring to be a primary source emotes a sense of archival wonder. Despite only mentioning potential historical exigence until the end, Fair’s diary shares many features with those who set out to produce a historical document. She gives statistics and local and global news alongside her personal analysis of the pandemic situation, much like Swayne.

A final diary writer that began with explicit historical exigence was Janet M. Burne, who titled her contribution “Postcards From the Pandemic,” with the annotation, “I intended to record the lived experience of the COVID-19 pandemic through the mundane details of our coping strategies, set against larger, national events” (Burne). Her diary is monthly, through March 2020 to January 2022, progressively skipping more months as time passes. Skipping was a common feature of diaries that extended past 2020. The entries seem to be written much later than the events they describe, which may be a consequence of the monthly frequency. Occasionally, on particularly important dates, she would make a single day entry for an event, one being the murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020, which was recorded on 26 May in Burne’s diary:

We are horrified by the video of his murder taken on her cell phone by a teenaged by-stander: nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds of Derek Chauvin kneeling on his neck… The summer will be rent by Black Lives Matter marches across the country and around the world. COVID restrictions notwithstanding, crowds are huge, but most wear masks and seem to be trying to socially distance. (Burne, 26 May 2020)

This entry exemplifies some patterns throughout Burne’s diary. First, it focuses on her reaction to a broader event that did not happen to her specifically, with plenty of detail, placing her story into the broader historical narrative. Second, it shifts tenses and mentions later summer events in a way that suggests this entry was originally written far after the event, or rewritten later. This kind of reflective writing is useful, but less so when the reader cannot use an entry as an indicator of what the writer knew at a single time.

Methodologies for JOTPY

A key shared feature of the JOTPY diaries is the aim to be historically significant while writing, producing diaries that closely integrate current events alongside personal events. This can be useful to determine who had access to information and when they did. For example, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps a timeline of COVID related events and milestones, but diaries like Fair’s can tell historians when an event first became relevant to high-schoolers of her demographic in Massachusetts. Further, the personal nature of diaries provides an additional affective timeline, one that shows real-time reactions to events rather than only factual descriptions.

A methodology for using JOTPY diaries is studying the progression of events mentioned in the diary, triangulating them with documents related to that event, and relating them to personal events and their sentiment. The second step is made easier by the writer’s historical exigence: they provided information about events with enough precision to easily triangulate them.

To demonstrate this methodology, I took note that Deborah Swayne’s diary mentions an important sequence of events: the creation and release of the COVID vaccine. She first mentions this as a future possibility on 29 March 2020, but according to the Immunize.org vaccine timeline, the first vaccine isn’t available to the public until 11 December 2020 (“Vaccine History Timeline”). Using the information in the timeline, I looked at Swayne’s entries from December 2020, and on 12 December, she writes about hearing the news. She paraphrases an Atlantic article by Sarah Zhang, who projects that the next six months will start a new chapter of confusion over who gets the vaccine first and how behavior can or cannot change in response (qtd. in Swayne, 12 December 2020). Burne also mentions the mixed reaction to the vaccine in her first reference to the it, after she is vaccinated in February 2021: “I feel feel elation of a sort, kind of funny, because nothing really changes: we must still wear masks, socially distance, avoid crowds, and so forth” (Burne, Feb. 2021). Looking at a timeline alone, the creation of the vaccine may seem like a groundbreaking change in the pandemic historical narrative, and in some ways it was, but referring to the diaries allows us to see the actual impact of the event on individuals.

Swayne referencing the article is also an example of her doing the triangulation for us. She becomes very involved with the vaccine over the next few months, even participating in a clinical trial. In addition to case numbers, she provides regular updates on immunization rates and her take on vaccine release strategies. Despite this involvement, her sentiment is still very worried. She deals with this through exercise and social interaction through Zoom. The juxtaposition of her personal life with this broader historical context that she provides us affords historians the ability to directly connect her experience with the common shared experience of living in a pandemic.

This methodology can be further applied, in a different way, to Julia Fair’s diary. While she doesn’t explicitly mention historical exigence until the end of her entries, her entries suggest she considered a historical lens while she wrote. She gives exact dates for her local school’s shutdowns, alongside her affective response. This kind of real-time reflection is much like social media posts, but concentrated into a diary format, where we can see Fair moving from an unaffected and incredulous stance on pandemic responses to a more common feeling of losing control. While I haven’t triangulated this information with other documents like school announcements and news reports, primarily to avoid feeling like I’m doxxing a child, a historian may choose to compare her response to the tone of these documents. They may find discrepancies between the broader historical narrative and this individual’s experience.

By taking an event and searching for references to it, diaries can be used to find individual responses to broader events, but diaries in JOTPY and similarly crowd-sourced archives make this even more effective, since much of the historical triangulation is pointed to directly by the writers.

Conclusion

Diaries offer a unique opportunity for historians to study personal narratives alongside broader historical narratives, taking into consideration the diaries’ exigence and audience. As the JOTPY diaries were often written with historical research in mind, they included commentary on public events as they happened, which allows historians to determine what information a writer had access to and when it was present in their minds. Studying crowd-sourced archival diaries for these features allows historians to more easily triangulate historical facts as they relate the personal narrative in the diary to broader historical narratives. These methods can further be applied to other crowd-sourced work, and calls for historical data from lay-people instructed to keep historians in mind may be an advantageous way to curate useful historical artifacts.

Works Cited

Burne, Janet M. “Postcards From the Pandemic.” A Journal of the Plague Year, March 2020. https://covid-19archive.org/s/archive/item/60901.

Fair, Julia. “Pandemic Diary Entries.” A Journal of the Plague Year, 7 March 2020. https://covid-19archive.org/s/archive/item/20771.

Frei, Cheryl Jiménez, and Shane A. Carlson. “Surviving, Learning, and Striving in the Times of Pandemic: Teaching With a Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19 (JOTPY).” Collections, vol. 17, no. 3, Dec. 2020, pp. 255–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/1550190620981031.

“COVID-19 Timeline.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 15 Mar. 2023, www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html.

Craft, Erin. “A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19 as a Community of Practice.” Collections, vol. 17, no. 3, Dec. 2020, pp. 267–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/1550190620981042.

van Dijck, José. “Writing the Self: Of Diaries and Weblogs.” Sign Here! Handwriting in the Age of New Media, edited by Sonja Neef et al., Amsterdam UP, 2006, pp. 116–33. https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/13242.

Lejeune, Philippe. “The Practice of the Private Journal: Chronicle of an Investigation (1986–1998).” On Diary, edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, University of Hawai’i Press, 2009, pp. 29–48. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wqmvp.6.

“NCPH Peer Review Roundtable” A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19, by Arizona State University, covid-19archive.org/s/archive/page/ncph.

Steinitz, Rebecca. “Writing Diaries, Reading Diaries: The Mechanics of Memory.” Communication Review, vol. 2, no. 1, June 1997, p. 43. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1080/10714429709368549.

Swayne, Deborah. “Covid journal, 2020-2023.” A Journal of the Plague Year, 25 February 2020. https://covid-19archive.org/s/archive/item/60234.

Tebeau, Mark. “A Journal of the Plague Year: Rapid-Response Archiving Meets the Pandemic.” Collections, vol. 17, no. 3, Jan. 2021, pp. 199–206. https://doi.org/10.1177/1550190620986550.

“Vaccine History Timeline.” Immunize.org, 27 Mar. 2024, www.immunize.org/vaccines/vaccine-timeline.

“What We Do.” A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19, by Arizona State University, covid-19archive.org/s/archive/page/whatwedo.