The Covid-19 Oral History Project
At the beginning of March, the students in my Digital Public History course and I made the decision to radically revise the course to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. We saw it as our responsibility as public historians to respond to the crisis by creating an oral history archive that documented the experience of the pandemic as it unfolds.
We developed what we called The COVID-19 Oral History Project which allows professional researchers and the broader public can create and upload their oral histories to our database. The data that we collect will be open access, open source and shared with researchers and the public. Our hope is that the dataset will serve as
an historical archive that compiles oral histories about the experience of living through the covid-19 pandemic.
a tool that allows individuals and communities to express their understandings, hopes, beliefs, and values about the covid-19 pandemic.
a resource to help researchers, policy makers, activists, artists, and communities interpret and respond to current and future pandemics.
As the project has developed, we have teamed up with researchers across the United States and in several countries to begin collecting the stories of COVID-19. We’ve also teamed up with the COVID-19 Archive at Arizona State University and the developers at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University to curate oral histories for the project. We will begin merging our projects in the next several weeks.
To learn more about The COVID-19 Oral History Project, or to participate as a researcher or interviewee, click here.