Share Your Story: Journal of the plague year / Arizona State University

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Whole cities and countries in lock down, an economic crash comparable with the Great Depression, and a health crisis the likes of which the rich world hasn’t experienced for a hundred years.

The COVID-19 outbreak is a momentous time in history and ordinary people around the world are recording their experiences and feelings, whether online or in diaries, whether in text, audio recordings, stills or video.

 

 

But when future generations seek to make sense of what is happening now where will they go? 

 

  

 Anticipating the needs of the future, historians around the world have joined together to create a live digital archive of peoples’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Led by researchers from Arizona State University,

 A Journal of the Plague Year: 

An Archive of COVID-19 is an online archive that anyone can submit content to.

“We’re always living in history, but usually we have the luxury of not being aware of it,” says Arizona State Associate Professor Catherine O’Donnell who along with colleague Associate Professor Mark Tebeau, came up with the idea for a COVID-19 archive.

“It occurred to me that we were preservers of the things future historians would very much want to know about,” she says.

Accounts of past pandemics have become important works of literature – like Samuel Pepys’ diaries that provide a first-hand account of the 1665 outbreak of bubonic plague in London.

 

A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel of the 1665 outbreak, which may have been based on his own uncle’s diaries, inspired the name of the project.

Accounts like these are rich in fascinating historical detail but they are limited in the voices they present. 

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