Digital Humanities Seed Grant Project
Project Title: COVID Collections
Project Team: Jacob Remes, Ellen Noonan, Valerie Marlowe, Scott Knowles
Abstract: As COVID-19 began to dominate the global agenda during the spring of 2020, museums, libraries, and archives around the world announced efforts to document human experiences of illness, isolation, economic downturn, fear, adaptation, and solidarity. These efforts ranged widely in scale and methods, from local historical societies seeking personal reflections to large scale federally-funded oral history projects. What will become of these various collecting efforts, and how will scholars be able to locate them effectively? The COVID Collections Project aims to catalogue the many COVID-19 oral history, documentation, and archiving projects that have begun since winter 2020. As a multi-year project, we have started to survey repositories and oral historians to discover and catalogue the collections that are being built around the global experience of COVID-19. We will then develop a website that will help researchers find these collections. We also hope to foster collaborations among archivists, documentarists, and historians as the collections are being developed. The COVID Collections Project is a collaboration among the Initiative for Critical Disaster Studies (NYU Gallatin), the Archives and Public History Program (NYU GSAS), and the E.L. Quarantelli Resource Collection at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center.