South African COVID-19 Diaries
Domaine:
socioeconomicType de record:
Project Overview
In the week of March 23, 2020 Nancy Jacobs and Lorato Trok assembled a journal-writing team of 18 South African students from under-privileged Black urban and rural communities. Lorato is an author and literacy specialist in South Africa who identified our participants through her literacy networks and coached the students through the project. Nancy is a Professor at Brown University who secured support for the project from Office of the Vice President for Research at Brown University, the Brown Arts Initiative, and the History Department at Brown University.
Data Collection Overview
We paid the students a stipend of $20/week for participating and covered their data costs. The financial aid helped stimulate participation and (as they later explained) motivated family support for the project. The students produced an archive that documented the experience of the pandemic in their communities through writings, photographs, and audio-video interviews. They submitted two to three exercises a week for 10 weeks. Because we wanted fuller narratives than can be produced through texting, participants hand-wrote their journal entries, photographed them and submitted via WhatsApp. The project closed in the last week of June. The entire archive consists of over 400 pages of mostly handwritten responses (in English) to weekly prompts, 89 short audio or video interviews, some very short, transcribed and translated into English, and several dozen photographs. The project is organized around contributors, identified by first name only. Most students submitted interviews and photographs in addition to text. Some only submitted text. The last entry in the archive contains reflections on the project itself. The students were serious about leaving a historical record about this exceptional moment. Many told us their families appreciated the assistance in a hard time.
Shared Data Organization
The project is organized around contributors, identified by first name only. Each individual interview transcript has two verisons: an original and an English translated version labeled TR.