Category Archives: Colleges and Universities

Documenting COVID-19 (Villanova University)

All Villanova University students, faculty, staff, and alumni are invited to contribute to the Documenting COVID-19 collection effort, created by Falvey Memorial Library, in conjunction with the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest. Villanovans may:

    • Submit their story
    • Share images (photographs, artwork)
    • Share a video or audio recording
    • Create and share a collection of objects
    • Share any reflections from this unique period

Contributors may submit as many times as they like, as events unfold, emotions change, or they feel like sharing more about their experience. Collecting will be ongoing throughout the pandemic and in the subsequent weeks after the pandemic has passed. All submissions will be preserved in the University Archives at Falvey Memorial Library.

Coronavirus Chronicles

Created by PhD candidates Conor Donnan, Sarah Yu and Jennifer Yip at University of Pennsylvania, Coronavirus Chronicles invites people of diverse backgrounds around the world to pen “diaries” of their day-to-day, as well as to share their thoughts on public health strategies. The resulting collage of stories, presented on an online platform, will facilitate continued connection, and demonstrate that no one is or should be alone in this fight. The voices of the majority of people are often neglected in history books, but this project hopes to provide future scholars and members of the public with diverse perspectives on COVID-19.

A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project

The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, in collaboration with Tomie Arai, Lena Sze, Vivian Truong, and Diane Wong, is in the early stages of developing A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project, a public memory project related to COVID-19 and A/P/A communities. For more information, read the framing statement. If you are interested in being involved, please email apa.archives@nyu.edu.  

the covid-19 oral history project

The COVID-19 Oral History Project is a rapid response oral history focused on archiving the lived experience of the COVID-19 epidemic. Based at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), this project emerged from the collective efforts of graduate students in the IUPUI Public History and American Studies Programs. The COVID-19 Oral History Project is housed at the IUPUI Arts & Humanities Institute. It is a partner project with The Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of Covid19.

This project is designed so that professional researchers and the broader public can create and upload their oral histories to our database. They are seeking researchers with experience conducting oral histories or ethnographies to help conduct a series of formal oral histories and also offering a series of workshops to train members of the public to conduct oral histories in their communities.

All the data that participants collect and produce will be open access, open source and shared with researchers and the public through the IUPUI Library and the Covid-19 Archive.

The dataset will serve as

  1. an historical archive that compiles oral histories about the experience of living through the COVID-19 pandemic.

  2. a tool that allows individuals and communities to express their understandings, hopes, beliefs, and values about the COVID-19 pandemic.

  3. a resource to help researchers, policy makers, activists, artists, and communities interpret and respond to current and future pandemics.

 

Community Survey on COVID-19 Crisis

The History Center in Tompkins County and the Cornell University Archives are collaborating in an ongoing archival collections project related to the impacts of COVID-19. To this end, we have created a survey to field responses from the Tompkins County and Cornell community on how people have been experiencing and reflecting on the COVID-19 crisis. While many of us are still processing the events unfolding, we would like to ask those who are willing to share to please take a few moments to fill out our coronavirus survey.
 
When answering these questions or talking about these subjects, consider them in the context of your personal life, family, daily activities, and community. Your responses will be compiled into an archival collection documenting the responses to the COVID-19 outbreak at Cornell and the local repercussions of the disease in Tompkins County. Documenting how the community has grappled with the challenges of this crisis will help scholars, future researchers, and our descendants understand what this tumultuous time was like.
 
For more information about this project, contact the archivist at The History Center in Tompkins County, Donna Eschenbrenner, archives@thehistorycenter.net or the Cornell University Archivist, Evan Earle, efe4@cornell.edu. To learn more about The History Center’s mission, visit their website at https://thehistorycenter.net/.

Social Distancing: Stories from the Union Community

Social Distancing: Stories from the Union Community captures the unique experiences from students, faculty, staff, and community members of Union College, Schenectady, and the region during the COVID-19 pandemic. The site is created and maintained by Schaffer Library in partnership with the Minerva Programs.

The site includes information on Union’s response to the pandemic as it progresses, maps and stories about the Union community’s responses, library and college resources, and the opportunity for community members to contribute their own stories to a community archive. 

 

NYC COVID-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive

Co-directors: Amy Starecheschi, Denise Milstein, Ryan Hagen, Mary Marshall Clark
PI: Peter Bearman

A team of sociologists, oral historians, and anthropologists at Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) and the Oral History Archives at Columbia is building an archive documenting New York City’s experience of the pandemic. The archive focuses on New York—a city of neighborhoods—to illuminate and document the social structure of the pandemic. The project combines sociology and oral history to create a rich, composite picture of the struggle against COVID-19 as it evolves over the next year and beyond.

For this project, they are conducting video interviews with each narrator three times over the course of twelve months. The voices from these interviews are enriched by written diaries chronicling daily life during the pandemic and survey data tracking the demography of participants and their social lives.

The public archive that results from this project will be available to researchers, health workers and advocates, historians, artists, and policymakers in 2022, although they expect to share some of our material before then.

Since late March, the team of thirty oral history interviewers has been working to record initial interviews with two hundred New Yorkers, including doctors, nurses, home health aides, funerary workers, doulas, parents, homeless people, organizers, artists, immigrants, teachers, other essential workers, public officials, and everyday New Yorkers of all kinds. At the same time, they are gathering chronicles and survey responses from a broad sample of the city’s population.

If you are interested in participating in this project by filling out a survey, writing chronicles, or participating in interviews, this info sheet will tell you how. You can also reach the team by email at covid19archive@gmail.com