I am a medical anthropologist who has dedicated much of my career to understanding how societies respond to epidemic outbreaks. My 2016 book, Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health after an Epidemic, examines the long aftermath of the 2003 SARS epidemic. Like Covid-19, SARS was caused by a novel coronavirus that appeared in China, spread steadily for months, and threatened to escalate into a pandemic. Unlike Covid, however, SARS was the pandemic that wasn’t. It killed “only” eight hundred people worldwide before disappearing just months after it first appeared.

When Covid-19 upended our lives last March, I was both horrified and curious. Covid was about to become the pandemic that SARS never was. Even as I hoarded toilet paper and struggled to homeschool my kids, I felt a sense of urgency to record this moment. But how? Everyone was suddenly an armchair epidemiologist, and Covid was rapidly becoming the most thoroughly blogged, vlogged (video-logged) and tweeted pandemic in history. Unsure what I could or should try to contribute amidst all the noise, I turned to my colleague Sarah Willen, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. As it turns out, Willen was wondering the same thing.

With all the restrictions in place and challenges that people were experiencing, neither of us felt we could or should do what anthropologists normally do: embed ourselves with a community and observe and interview its members. We could not travel, and even asking people for a Zoom interview felt intrusive when so many people were struggling with job loss, food insecurity, trauma, illness and death. At the same time, we felt it was critical to preserve the narratives of those experiencing those very things. How could we collect and preserve these stories in a systematic but non-intrusive way?

Willen suggested a medium she had been using herself for decades: journaling. What if we created a way for people around the world to keep journals of their experiences, on their own time and at their own discretion, which we would then collect, organize, and archive for posterity? In March 2020 we sat down to work out what this would look like. We didn’t want to only collect stories from those who liked to write and had easy access to a computer. To be as inclusive as possible we knew we would have to create a platform that would be simple to use, would run on a smartphone, would allow for modes of expression other than writing, and would be available in languages other than English. We also knew that to be useful from a historical standpoint we would have to collect some background information about participants, and we would have to find a way to store and preserve the material. Finally, to encourage broad participation we knew we would have to preserve participants’ anonymity and solicit help in recruitment.

In May 2020, we launched the Pandemic Journaling Project. PJP provides a digital space, accessible via a smartphone or computer, for people to create weekly journals of their Covid experiences. Anyone ages 15+, living anywhere in the world, can create journal entries of any length using text, images, or audio recordings. In the first year of the project, PJP has enrolled 1,500 participants from 45 countries and has collected more than 14,000 individual journal entries.

PJP’s platform runs in English and Spanish, but participants can submit journals in any language. We collect demographic data in a baseline survey, along with basic information about mental and physical health, Covid exposure, political leanings and employment status. Participants are invited back weekly to submit more journals and complete brief follow-up surveys. Each time they submit an entry, participants decide whether to make it available for sharing on our Featured Entries page, or to keep it to themselves and the research team for the next 25 years. They can also download a pdf of all of their entries at any time. When the pandemic ends, journals and meta-data will be deposited with the Qualitative Data Repository. Twenty-five years after the project’s conclusion, the entire corpus will be converted into a publicly accessible historical archive.

PJP is an initiative rooted in our commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration and mentorship. Willen and I did not have the skills to put in place everything that was needed to build and run our platform ourselves. So, we reached out to our scholarly networks, and put together a research team and advisory board that presently includes nearly fifty faculty members and students from half a dozen universities. To develop our baseline survey, we teamed up with Abigail Fisher Williamson, a political scientist at Trinity College. To program weekly journal invitations and follow up surveys we hired talented graduate students with quantitative skills much better than our own (Kiran McCloskey at UConn, Becca Wang at Brown and Imari Smith at Duke). We also hired graduate and undergraduate students in anthropology and related disciplines to run our day-to-day operations. Alice Larotonda, a 2020 Brown Anthropology PhD, took on the early challenge of administratively managing the project, translating materials into Spanish, and mentoring our undergraduate RA team. Her position is now held by current Anthropology PhD student Lauren Deal. Brown undergraduates Emily Nguyen and Ana Perez, and UConn undergraduate Jolee Fernandez, design our social media pages, translate journal prompts, assist in weekly survey distributions, and take leading roles in recruitment.

As the project progressed, new needs emerged, and new partners came on board to help. Students from my Spring 2021 Anthropology of Mental Health class chipped in to help develop a response protocol for journalers in distress. Our diverse student advisory board helped us reach out to social media influencers, community organizations, unions and educators to make sure we were reaching diverse populations. Colleagues at other universities who had adopted PJP as a teaching tool helped us develop resource guides for educators. And UConn and Brown chipped in funding and organizational support, including a recent Brown seed grant awarded to Brown Education faculty member Andrea Flores and myself to study first-generation college students’ experiences of the pandemic using PJP.

As time went on, PJP also became more involved with public scholarship and community engagement. In February 2021 we were featured as the lead story in the Science section of the New York Times, and appeared on several NPR programs, including the nationally syndicated show The Takeaway. In April 2021 we began collaborating with CT Rise, a non-profit that supports under-resourced schools in Connecticut, to enlist hundreds of high school students to participate in the project. In May we presented our work to the Connecticut State Legislature as part of an initiative of the Commission on Women, Children, Seniors, Equity and Opportunity. We also are collaborating with Brown History professor Nancy Jacobs and her South African collaborator Lorato Trok to preserve South African high school students’ pandemic journals.

As we pass the one-year anniversary of PJP’s launch, we are proud of what we have accomplished, but horrified that the project is still so relevant. When we launched in May of 2020, optimism – in the US at least – was high. Cases were dropping, the weather was warming, and many thought the worst was over. One colleague lamented that we were starting the project “too late,” because the pandemic seemed to be winding down. We wish they hadn’t been so wrong.

This May, optimism is in the air again. Once again, cases are down, the weather is warming, and many feel this long nightmare is finally almost over. But despite the undeniable gains brought by effective vaccines and new scientific knowledge about the virus, we expect that people will want and need to keep telling their Covid stories for years to come. Even putting aside the long-term effects of Covid in the US, about one-fifth of our participants live outside this country. In many of these participants’ home countries, the nightmare is only deepening.

Just a few weeks ago, for example, a 20-year-old Brazilian participant wrote of the pain of losing two of her closest friends to Covid. “Not being able to say goodbye, to see them one last time or having a funeral, that really messed up my mind,” she wrote. She admitted that it was hard to feel hopeful, because in Brazil, the body count continued to mount, and there was no end in sight. As long as participants like this young woman want to share their stories, PJP will be there to record them.