Beginning this month, the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), a qualitative data repository containing over 27,000 personal accounts from the pandemic, will be housed at the Qualitative Data Repository at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. At its new home, this large-scale data collection will be made widely accessible to researchers for years to come, ensuring that the project’s democratically produced record of the COVID-19 pandemic will be accurately reflected in history. 

Co-founded by PSTC anthropologist Kate Mason and Sarah Willen, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, the PJP was created during the early months of the pandemic to give ordinary people a space to document their daily experiences during this transformative historical period. Supported with seed funding from the PSTC, the project collected weekly journal entries from over 1,800 people from over 55 different countries between May 2020 and May 2022.

“Our PJP motto is ‘Usually, history is written only by the powerful. When the history of COVID-19 is written, let's make sure that doesn't happen.’ That motto drives everything that we do,” Mason explains. “With no incentives other than the promise of becoming a part of history, nearly 2,000 people chose to document their lives weekly in this way.” 

Now, thanks to its new placement at the Qualitative Data Repository (QDR), this multimedia data set will remain accessible to those seeking to study the first two years of the pandemic moving forward, ensuring that these wide-ranging personal accounts are included in the historical narrative. For the next five years, the data will be made accessible to all researchers who apply and receive approval from the PJP co-founders, the QDR, and their own institution's review board, after which no permission will be required from the PJP co-founders. By 2049, the project’s data repository will be made accessible to the general public. 

“Diaries kept by people in the past are an important source of historical material for the present. But historical diaries overwhelmingly tend to be kept and preserved by those with education and means,” Mason explains. “What I am most excited about is that we have left this immense treasure trove for future historians.”

As the pandemic has evolved over the past several years, so too has the work of the PJP. Beginning in 2022, the project moved on to its second stage, PJP-2, where participants are asked to journal once every three months rather than weekly. Under this new stage, the PJP has also expanded its work in a variety of side projects, which examine the pandemic’s disproportionate impacts on specific populations, such as first-generation college students and immigrant women.

“We are looking at longer term outcomes on those already experiencing the brunt of health inequalities,” Mason explains. “This is really important to study because unfortunately, although many people feel Covid is "over," the effects of it are not going to go away for a long time, if ever.”

This shift has been particularly critical as the COVID-19 pandemic evolved from a singular historical “event” into a longer historical time period – one where public health impacts are increasingly stratified across various communities. However, rather than replicating these inequities, the PJP instead embodies a theory of archival activism that centers the voices of those long excluded from historical narratives of influence. 

“These stories need to live on. We are all, I think, experiencing a bit of amnesia about what happened to us just a few years ago, because we want so badly to just move on and be normal,” Mason explains. “But Covid has changed us, for better or for worse. It has changed ‘normal.’ This collection will help us understand how.”