For centuries, all types of people have kept journals or diaries. Unfortunately, most of them get lost in history, unless fame and fortune come the writer\u2019s way.<\/p>\n
The Pandemic Journaling Project<\/a> is designed to make sure that does not happen during the unprecedented times of the COVID-19 pandemic. The project, which began last May<\/a>, lets people all over Connecticut, the United States, and the world create a lasting record of their personal experiences. It will then serve as a data repository for researchers in the humanities, social sciences, and health sciences for decades to come.<\/p>\n More than 550 people from the United States and 24 other countries have so far joined the project, which is fully online and open to new contributors.<\/p>\n \u201cJournaling means different things to different people — and for the Pandemic Journaling Project, it doesn’t even need to involve writing,\u201d says UConn associate professor of anthropology Sarah Willen, who co-founded the project with Katherine Mason, an assistant professor of anthropology at Brown University. \u201cWe are inviting people to carve out a space to put their thoughts down. Of course people can write if they want to, but they can also upload photos, or speak into their phone and upload an audio file. Some entries look a lot like social media posts. Others are more systematic chronicles — or even poems. These are all terrific ways of capturing the impact of the pandemic on real people’s lives.”<\/p>\n The Pandemic Journaling Project is open to anyone from anywhere in the world who is 18 years of age or over. A computer is not needed to participate, only a mobile phone. Each week, participants are asked a few short survey questions, then invited to create two journal entries. The first question is the same each week \u2013 how has the pandemic affected your life in the past week? For the second entry, participants are given a choice of questions about some aspect of everyday life, ranging from finances to living circumstances to trust in government.<\/p>\n