The team of historians and artists launched A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19 on March 13, two days after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History deployed a Rapid Response Collecting Task Force to chronicle the pandemic. For a professor who teaches digital public history, it meant something else, too: How people experienced the outbreak needed to be captured and organised in a searchable database. That was the seed of what is now the COVID-19 Oral History Project, based at the Arts and Humanities Institute on the Indianapolis campus. The page from Denney’s diary became one of the first submissions to the coronavirus public memory project set up by Wright State University.

Source: bd News24 April 16, 2020 09:11 UTC