Lothian Lockdown: The Lothian Diary Project investigates questions of public health, media and communication among residents of Edinburgh and the Lothians in relation to COVID-19. The project draws on individuals’ personal accounts of the pandemic, in the form of diary data recorded during the UK stay-at-home order.
The project is an interdisciplinary effort to create a corpus of audio/video diaries from the Covid-19 pandemic in Edinburgh and the Lothians. The major knowledge exchange (KE) goals for the project are to create a report to submit to the Covid-19 Committee at Scottish Parliament, and to create an oral history archive to share with Museums and Galleries Edinburgh. Participant recruitment was launched on the 25th of May, the last week of full lockdown in Scotland. As of writing (the 7th of July), we have 60 contributions.
As we process the incoming videos, one of our KE projects has been to transcribe and subtitle those videos which are marked as being publicly shareable. Our hope is to be able to feature a selection of these videos on our website, to enable others to begin to experience and understand the diversity of experiences held across the community. We plan to highlight this diversity in November 2020 at the Being Human Festival, where we will showcase the range of lockdown stories that come from different corners of the community.
We are still very actively looking for new participants. Each contribution (a pre-recorded audio/video diary and answers to our survey) is thanked with £15, either via bank transfer, local business voucher, or charity donation. Each contributor who then refers another contributor is further thanked with an additional £5. For more information, please visit:
Dr Lauren Hall-Lew – Lothian Diary Project