Abby Ohlheiser and Tanya Basu* say researchers, archivists, and citizens are racing to preserve a record of this strange period of history.
Eight years ago, Suleika Jaouad was alone in a hospital room, undergoing aggressive treatment for leukemia and awaiting a bone marrow transplant.
Just out of university and harbouring dreams of becoming a war correspondent, Jaouad was instead confined to her hospital room and felt desperately alone.
In the end, journaling helped Jaouad through her medical isolation.
Nearly a decade later, in remission but immunocompromised, she found herself in an eerily familiar situation as the coronavirus crisis forced her to shelter in place at home in New York.
So, she launched The Isolation Journals, a project designed to encourage people to capture their experiences as they navigate life during the pandemic.
She reached out to people to brainstorm prompts that are emailed to participants at 5 am US Eastern time.
“Within five hours, we had 20,000 people sign up,” Jaouad says.
“Now, it’s about 60,000 participants.”
While it’s possible to take part with just pen and paper, many users have posted their responses on Instagram and Twitter, tagged with #theisolationjournals.
Contributions range from simple photos to dance videos, original music and art.
Now there is a scramble to collect, in real time, the overwhelming abundance of information being produced online.
Without it, the record of how we lived, how we changed, and how we addressed the global pandemic would be left incomplete and at the mercy of a constantly shifting internet.
In theory, these creative efforts should form a readymade repository of crucial information about this period and how we lived through it.
But while it may seem important to collect this information, it’s hard to know exactly what will matter in 10, 50, or 100 years.
And that’s not to mention what happens when the platforms we use disappear.
Modern social networks like Snapchat and Instagram — really, anything with a storytelling feature where posts disappear over time — have ephemerality built in.
Still, it can be hard to collect all the information in one place.
Keeping a record of the times is particularly important given the volatility of people’s lives right now.
Projects like Jaouad’s will preserve portions of our lived experience during the pandemic.
But getting the internet to archive as much as possible about this moment is a monumental, ongoing task.
Mark Graham is the Director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, a group that is now part of the race to archive important content related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The novel coronavirus collection project, launched on 13 February with the International Internet Preservation Consortium, is collecting and archiving pages and resources connected to the pandemic.
“Archiving has never been about saving everything,” says Graham.
“It’s about trying to save a representation.”
According to Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive’s founder, his organisation is already collecting about 1 billion URLs a day across the web.
Archiving the pandemic means trying to identify and collect the pages their ordinary efforts might otherwise overlook, relying on a network of library professionals and members of the public.
“The average life of a web page is only 100 days before it’s changed or deleted,” he says.
Archives have shaped how we understand our past.
During the Great Depression in the 1930s, there was a massive effort to document aspects of American life: the Farm Security Administration sent photographers across the country.
The resulting work, 175,000 photographic negatives, is a valuable pictorial record of life during the Depression.
But the internet is on a much bigger scale, and all those who post are potentially their own documentarian and curator.
Capturing the COVID pandemic online isn’t just about saving a URL; it’s about saving the right URLs over and over again, to show how things have changed over time.
The US Library of Congress (LOC) and the Internet Archive both know they’re going to miss broad parts of the COVID pandemic playing out online.
The LOC has to seek permission from site owners to collect and provide public access to an archived version of a domain, and the Internet Archive is up against a web that might shift more quickly than it is able to capture.
The process is already recording shifts in how powerful institutions are addressing the crisis.
For example, the language on the US Government web page describing the National Strategic Stockpile was altered after Jared Kushner suggested that the store of medical supplies and pharmaceuticals wasn’t intended for States to use.
The new description removed language that appeared to contradict this statement.
Both versions were captured by the Wayback Machine, which was saving versions of that page every few hours.
There may be many other small, but valuable, data points we might miss that could give future historians a fuller understanding of this period.
The pandemic and the forced change in our behaviour is also changing the way we interact with our personal social-media archives.
During the pandemic, people are taking nostalgia-driven journeys into their own online histories, seeking comfort by looking at the way we were.
Even this is becoming part of the story of how we lived online during a global crisis.
For example, a generation of young adults are flocking to Tumblr, which has seen a bump in traffic since people began socially isolating in mid-March, for nostalgic comfort and memories of their younger selves (this might explain the recent spike in searches on Tumblr for “emo hair”).
Amanda Brennan, a librarian at Tumblr says such deeply personal sites can function a bit like commonplace books, the Renaissance-era scrapbooks where scholars would compile quotes and ideas, documenting the development of their thinking.
Part of understanding history is about what happened.
But commonplace books, and personal archives like Tumblr, can help tell us who we were.
* Abby Ohlheiser is Senior Editor, Humans and Technology, at MIT Technology Review. She tweets at @abbyohlheiser. Tanya Basu is Senior Reporter, Humans and Technology, at MIT Technology Review. She tweets at @tanyabasu.
This article first appeared at www.technologyreview.com.
