Five years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic upended daily lives across the globe, changing how we learned, how we shopped and how we interacted with each other. Over the following two years, the virus caused the deaths of several million people, including more than 1 million Americans.  

For the next month the Maxwell School’s Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) will help us remember this time by hosting a traveling version of an exhibit titled Picturing the Pandemic: Images from the Pandemic Journaling Project.

The exhibit is drawn from a collection of images and audio files contributed to the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), which was started in May 2020 by a team of researchers from the University of Connecticut and Brown University. Their goal was to create an online archive of COVID-19 stories, described as a “grassroots collaborative ethnography.” By May 2022, over 1,800 people from 55 countries had shared nearly 27,000 online journal entries of text, images and audio—including almost 3,000 photos. 

Maxwell is the seventh stop for Picturing the Pandemic, following exhibitions in Heidelberg, Mexico City and Toronto, as well as Hartford, Connecticut, where the show was first launched in 2022.  The QDR became permanent host of the data from phase one of the wider Pandemic Journaling Project early in 2024, making it a natural stop for the traveling exhibit. The exhibit can be found in the first floor foyer of Maxwell Hall until May 15.

The kickoff of the exhibit included a panel discussion featuring PJP co-founders Associate Professor Sarah S. Willen of the University of Connecticut and Associate Professor Katherine A. Mason of Brown University, as well as University Professor Amy Fairchild and Maxwell Associate Dean for Research Shana Gadarian. The talk was moderated by Sebastian Karcher, associate director of QDR.

The full PJP data maintained by QDR is currently available for use and re-use by researchers. Though, to protect privacy, access requires prior approval, with requests submitted from the dataset’s page on the QDR website. A significant subset of more than 2,000 entries are also publicly available for searching and browsing by anyone on the Featured Entries page of the PJP website.

By Cort Ruddy