When the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S. in mid-March, Katie Starliper started keeping a diary of what was obviously going in the history books.
It started as a record of what she learned about the spread of the virus every day, including screenshots of maps from Johns Hopkins University’s county-by-county tracking system, “and then it kind of devolved into my angry ranting about everything that was happening and how it was being handled,” said Starliper, a rising second-year master’s student in English at Mississippi State University.
“I just really wanted to have something so that someday looking back, I could look at that and say, ‘This is how I was experiencing it when it was happening,'” she added.
Starliper’s COVID-19 diary isn’t just for herself anymore. She submitted it to a digital archive that MSU Libraries is compiling to document the impact of the pandemic on the MSU community, from faculty and staff to students and the city of Starkville. Material ranges from photos of signage around town and campus to students’ social media posts and videos.
The archive was born from several conversations among MSU faculty and staff about how to properly “capture this time,” university archivist Jessica Perkins Smith said.
“We were thinking about how users might want to use this material in the future and what they might want to know, as well as what people may want to know just in the next year or so,” she said.
They also wanted to know where MSU’s diverse student population went and what they were up to, since most of them did not return to Starkville after spring break.
“We know that many students lost their jobs and may have struggled because of that, so their lives were kind of upended,” Perkins Smith said. “We know that moving classes online was not easy for all professors, and some classes didn’t lend themselves to moving online easily. We wanted to know more about what life was like during quarantine, once shelter in place orders were put into place.”
Additionally, MSU and Starkville are so interconnected that the archive will include records of initiatives that took place in the city, such as Starkville Strong, a local COVID-19 relief organization managed through Oktibbeha Starkville Emergency Response Volunteer Services (OSERVS). The organization grew from a few Facebook posts to an active network of resource-sharing in March.
Starkville city government is one of the entities MSU Libraries plans to contact to solicit submissions for the archive, and the archivists are also reaching out to international students and communities of color, Perkins Smith said.
Dhanashree Thorat, an assistant professor of English, stressed the importance of including the voices and active participation of groups that have often been excluded from the collection of their own history.
“We want to make sure we’re doing this kind of specific outreach,” Thorat said. “You really can’t tell the story COVID in Mississippi without talking about its impact on black communities here. … This will give groups a chance to say what they want in the archive.”
The digital humanities approach
Thorat taught a class during the spring semester called Digital Humanities, her area of expertise that explores how humanities scholars can use modern digital technology to further their research.
Starliper said she had never heard the phrase “digital humanities” before signing up for the class. She was one of eight English students, a mix of undergraduate and graduate, who found themselves with an opportunity to apply what they were learning to the pandemic as it was unfolding.
The group brainstormed a list of ethical questions for archivists to be aware of while collecting material, such as how to use the material to represent the voices of its owners.
“We talked a lot about how in the past, a lot of material was taken from people and used without their permission, or in ways that were harmful to their culture, so it was really important that we had that communication and acknowledgment of who was involved and how,” Starliper said.
She was not the only student in the class to contribute her own project to the archive. Katie Poe, also a rising second-year master’s student, saw the opportunity to interview her boyfriend, a native of Italy. His home country was hit especially hard by the pandemic, and Poe wanted to document an international student’s struggle with the distance between himself and his family, she said.
She also kept ethics in mind throughout the project.
“I didn’t want it to just be him telling the story through me,” Poe said. “I didn’t want to put myself in the center of it, so we sat down and talked before the interview about what questions he wanted me to ask. It was more like a collaboration.”
Learning from the past
Perkins Smith said MSU Libraries will eventually collect physical material from the pandemic, such as protective face masks, once it is safe to do so.
Long before the digital age, another global pandemic had a visible impact on the university. MSU Libraries has a collection of archived material from the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic and its impact on the university.
One memento from the collection is a photo of the interior of George Hall, which is home to the Department of Philosophy and Religion today but was the campus medical facility in the early twentieth century. The basement was temporarily converted to a morgue in 1918 when several students died of the flu.
The material provided some “reference questions” for the archivists as COVID-19 gained momentum in the U.S. in early March, Perkins Smith said.
MSU Libraries has a submission form on its website for anyone who wants to contribute to the archive. Participants can also see what others have submitted, Thorat said.
“It’s kind of a way of building a sense of community,” she said. “While we’ve all kind of been isolated and social distancing, we may not get to share things face-to-face, but through this kind of project, we can see how our experiences have been shared and connected in this community that we’re invested in.”
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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