In early April, Carolyn Evans watched from her mom’s couch as gay activists in Arizona reimagined their annual parade, dance party, and organizing event as a series of virtual meetups, lectures, and performances.
It was among the first online gay-pride festivals of the Covid-19 era, a private experience of joy and camaraderie. In the future, it may influence how scholars write the history of this period of mass disruption.
Evans is an Arizona State University graduate student who studies the history of Phoenix’s LGBT community. She’s also a lesbian who volunteers for gay-rights causes. She says gay people feel uniquely isolated now, cut off not only from physical spaces that affirm their identity but, in some cases, quarantined with people hostile to that identity.
How, Evans wondered, could phenomena like the virtual pride event — a community caring for its members in isolation — be preserved for history?
Many scholars are asking similar questions.
Historical archives often distort the past, magnifying privileged voices and silencing others. So historians and archivists are mobilizing social media and other technologies to build new archives that capture how diverse Americans are experiencing this moment.
As they scramble to gather the pandemic’s digital ephemera — emails, tweets, Reddit threads, Zoom memes — they’re groping for the right balance between preserving history and protecting privacy.
The collections that emerge from that tension will shape the questions that future scholars, students, and citizens can answer when they seek to understand this pandemic. How was the outbreak felt differently across lines of race, class, gender, and geography? How did it change higher education? How can the decisions Americans are making today inform their response to the next pandemic?
History’s ‘Informal Fabric’
The scale of today’s collecting will very likely eclipse the records available to study the 1918-19 influenza pandemic so often brought up as a parallel, says Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor whose digital archive of that tragedy has been — “until now,” he says — the largest “contagious crisis” collection. Historians have newspapers, diaries, letters, and novels to glimpse how ordinary Americans experienced that pandemic.
Other stories went unrecorded. Catherine O’Donnell, a historian at Arizona State, says two of her great-grandfathers died in the 1918 flu pandemic. She remembers hearing her grandfather describe how he came home from school to find his father, an Irish immigrant, on the stoop of their upstate New York home with his cap off and head down, at a time of day when he was never home. The next night, he was dead. Fear of the flu persisted within O’Donnell’s family for many years.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
To capture that “informal fabric” of history, O’Donnell and another Arizona State historian, Mark Tebeau, established A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of Covid-19. The project originated in March as a vehicle to teach students how the present becomes the past. It has grown into a digital umbrella, with collaborators at more than three dozen universities and a smattering of museums and historical societies.
The project is a crowdsourcing platform that invites anyone with a story to contribute. It’s a shoe-leather community-outreach effort, with curators collecting through personal networks. It’s also an employment service for grad students confronting a time of economic upheaval.
O’Donnell calls Journal of the Plague Year “the world’s smallest WPA project,” a reference to the New Deal cultural programs that employed writers, photographers, and others to document Americans’ lives.
After Evans, the Arizona State grad student, attended that virtual gay-pride event, she approached O’Donnell and Tebeau about working together. They named her a “curatorial fellow,” charged with documenting the local LGBT community’s experiences. Evans typically works summer jobs at speech and debate camps, which might not be an option this year, so the stipend helps. And the opportunity is meaningful to her.
“Someday, when people look back at this archive, I want there to be this amazing diversity of experiences,” Evans says, “so that everyone can see themselves in history.”
Disaster Archives
Journal of the Plague Year is the latest in a series of mass-disaster digital archives, dating at least to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Some of the first scholars to join the Arizona effort were at the University of New Orleans, which had previously helped to establish a Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, about Katrina and Rita.
Their takeaway from past projects: Disaster materials disappear.
“The most important lesson is how important it is to act quickly,” says Mary Niall Mitchell, a professor of history at the University of New Orleans. “And to get the idea across, not just to historians and archivists but to the general public, that this is an event that needs to be documented. And that there are so many different ways to go about that.”
Mitchell and colleagues in the university’s Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies are gathering stories of musicians and hospitality workers, groups key to the city’s tourism-dependent economy. They’ve collected photographs documenting how the pandemic is killing jazz elders. Screenshots of Facebook posts show how people in the city are rallying to help unemployed musicians (with Meals for Musicians) and bartenders (with vouchers for future drinks).
Someday, when people look back at this archive, I want there to be this amazing diversity of experiences, so that everyone can see themselves in history.
One archive entry captures a snapshot of threats facing the city — hunger, violence, severe weather — through an artist’s ruminations on the mayor’s Covid-19-related text-message alerts.
As a historian of 19th-century slavery and emancipation, Mitchell is attuned to the silences that mar archives created before the groundswell of efforts in recent decades to collect materials from more diverse segments of society. Collections from the period she studies tend to capture the voices of privileged white men who had the education to write letters and the families to preserve them.
“Whereas with the digital archive like this, where you’re inviting people to contribute their story, wow — boom! — right there, you have their voice,” Mitchell says. “It’s going to be dramatically different from anything we’ve really experienced before as historians, to be able to dig deep into questions of class and gender and sexuality and ethnicity, because you have these voices.”
College and Covid
Dozens of universities are focusing their archiving efforts inward, documenting their campuses’ experiences in what could eventually be seen as a historic moment for higher education.
One notable effort grew out of a digital-humanities class taught by Matthew K. Gold at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. When the pandemic hit, Gold and his students shifted their work to capturing how the sprawling public-college system — located in one of America’s Covid-19 epicenters — is handling the shift to online learning.
The CUNY Distance Learning Archive examines official directives from the institution, how faculty members are changing their courses in response, and how students are experiencing those changes. Gold’s team gathers social-media posts — searching hashtags like #cunycovid to harvest more than 46,000 tweets — as well as text-based narratives from faculty members and students.
One emerging theme is how in some ways “the online experience does not work for most students, especially in New York,” says Gold, an associate professor of English and digital humanities.
Gold’s group has amassed a stack of Reddit threads documenting students’ sometimes anxious and demoralizing transition. “Having a breakdown falling behind in online classes,” wrote one student on the verge of ditching the semester. Another expressed frustration that insufficient communication from CUNY had made it difficult to plan for the fall.
Ethical Issues
The Covid-19 archivists, whether focused on campuses or the public, grapple with a common challenge: privacy.
Evans, at Arizona State, is trying to balance her goal of preserving LGBT history with the recognition that members of that community are not always accepted. She guards against revealing details about people’s lives that aren’t meant to be shared.
Some researchers are shifting policies on the fly. At first Gold and his team asked students and professors to send in any Covid-19-related emails. They later switched to accepting only messages whose senders had consented to include them in the archive.
Gold’s group still hasn’t resolved another delicate issue: whether to put out a call for photos of students’ learning spaces at home.
“There was some uneasiness on the team that such a call could be intrusive,” Gold writes in an email. “Those fears speak to some of the tensions around this moment.”
But what about material that’s already in the public sphere?
Mitchell, the New Orleans historian contributing to A Journal of the Plague Year, says her team can capture Facebook content without permission, as long as it doesn’t come from private groups.
“We are considering these public documents,” she writes in an email, “because they are posted to Facebook, a public forum. They are informational work and hence fair use.”
It’s going to be dramatically different from anything we’ve really experienced before as historians, to be able to dig deep into questions of class and gender and sexuality and ethnicity, because you have these voices.
But another professor submitting content to the same archive feels an obligation to get permission even for public Facebook posts. Catherine Gudis, an associate professor of history at the University of California at Riverside, tracks how the pandemic is affecting Skid Row, a stretch of Los Angeles where many people live in single-room-occupancy hotels and tent encampments. She points out that the push to archive social media has spawned a national discussion about how to do so ethically, facilitated by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-backed project called Documenting the Now.
As part of that effort, some archivists and scholars have published a paper warning their peers that “fear of content ephemerality” should not drive archivists to “potentially abandon ethical practices.” Some of those writers had been involved with preserving tweets connected to the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Mo. One concern they raised was that law-enforcement agencies could weaponize social-media archives against vulnerable communities.
In her Skid Row work, Gudis monitors social-media videos like those produced by an activist group documenting the lack of water and by a tent resident who provides services such as sewing clothes. The historian hopes that residents like that woman will consent to have their posts archived as well as grant interviews to contextualize the materials.
“I am not going to add them to the archive without her consent,” Gudis writes in an email. “She may not have posted them with the intention that they would be saved for posterity, and she and others might not have dwelled on how their Twitter feed, for instance, might be used by researchers — and other people outside of their own social networks. They might not mind if they knew, but they ought to know.”
