Interview: Archiving the COVID-19 pandemic

London, England - May 12, 2020. Coronavirus: Blue heart shape featuring NHS on a graffiti wall, Hackney, London.

Archiving the COVID-19 pandemic in Mass Observation and Middletown, Special Section, interview with co-editor Nick Clarke (University of Southampton).

History of the Human Sciences: Clive Barnett with whom your collaborated on this Special Section sadly passed away before it was published. I wonder if you might want to begin by paying tribute to Clive and reflecting on your experience of working together?

Nick Clarke: In the summer of 2020, Clive and I started working on a project about popular responses to COVID-19, funded by the British Academy. A part of that project was a seminar series that we ran with the Mass Observation Archive. The Special Section emerged out of that seminar series. I was working with Clive on finalising the first draft of these articles when he died suddenly in December 2021. Clive and I had actually been working together for years, since I arrived in Bristol as a PhD student in 2000. I subsequently went on to work as a researcher for Clive as a postdoc. I considered him a close friend and his sudden death was devastating, of course for his family, but also for many friends of his in academia, myself included. No doubt Clive would have had lots of brilliant ideas for how to develop the Special Section.

Perhaps the best thing I can do for the purposes of this interview, instead of talking about Clive all day, which I could do, is to refer readers to a set of things that have been written about Clive in the last year or so. There was a blog post that I wrote soon after his death, about his generosity as a supervisor, a reader, a thinker and collaborator. This was posted on ‘Covid Responsibility’, a blog that we were both writing together specifically about popular responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Clive was an editor at the journal Progress in Human Geography at the time he died and there’s an a nice obituary there that people can read too.

HHS: Thank you so much. What were you hoping to achieve with this Special Section?

NC: Clive and I won the British Academy grant to study popular responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically by using Mass Observation’s COVID-19 collections. As I said, a part of that project was to organize a seminar series with the Mass Observation Archive where we got people from many different disciplines to talk to us about those collections and related collections of biographical writing about everyday life during the pandemic, including the Everyday Life in Middletown Project’s COVID-19 collections.

In the seminars, contributors were speaking about a particular way of knowing the pandemic through the human sciences, and especially through diaries and related forms like mass photography. Our seminar series was also archiving initial responses to these collections.  All of these initial analyses, it became clear to us, were informed by and shaped by the history of the human sciences, and especially the distinctive histories and human sciences of Mass Observation and Middletown. By the end of the seminar series we came around to the idea of submitting a Special Section to History of the Human Sciences that would focus on the pandemic and we thought it made sense to structure it around the past, the present and future.

The past, in the sense that archiving practices during the pandemic were informed and shaped by the histories of Mass Observation and Middletown. The present, in the sense that, among other things, what the articles in the Special Section seek to do is know the pandemic through the human sciences in the present. And the future, in the sense that one function of the Special Section, we hope, is to archive these initial engagements between researchers and archives, which could then inform researchers in the future.

HHS: What role did scholars from the human sciences contribute to ‘ways of knowing’ in the COVID-19 pandemic?

NC: In the introductory article we write about different ways of knowing pandemics. Of course, the most prominent way of knowing the COVID-19 pandemic – at least in the UK but I suspect all around the world – was through the health sciences: epidemiology, virology, and so on. But in the UK and probably elsewhere, the human sciences were also included in official ways of knowing the pandemic. So, for example, psychologists, behavioural scientists, anthropologists and historians were included in SAGE, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, or at least in expert groups on the periphery of SAGE. There were some very interesting debates among psychologists. There was an argument between what some people have called ‘the frailty tradition’ of psychology – that positions people as mentally frail, easily susceptible to pandemic fatigue, and so on – and a tradition that identifies as ‘the social identity tradition’, which argues that people can be expected to comply with the rules and guidance around non-pharmaceutical interventions so long as certain certain kinds of advice and information are provided to them and certain support is given.

We focus on one particular way of knowing pandemics through the human sciences in the Special Section:  diaries, other biographical writing, and related forms like mass photography. We do this not least because the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to be a diarological moment. Many diaries and similar forms were kept, produced, collected, published during the pandemic by many different actors.

HHS: Could you briefly introduce Mass Observation and the Middletown studies?

NC: I’ll try my best but they’re very complex organizations and projects with very complex histories!

Let’s start with Mass Observation, which in its original form existed from 1937 to the late 1940s. It was an independent research organization influenced by anthropology and surrealism, and primarily focused on revealing the everyday lives of ordinary people in the UK. It did that by using volunteers, so-called ‘mass observers’, who were meant to observe their own lives and the lives of people around them and then submit those observations to Mass Observation who would publish them.

In the introductory article to the Special Section we also write about the contemporary iteration of Mass Observation, which is made up of the Mass Observation Archive, established in 1975, attached to University of Sussex in Brighton. That archive contains the papers of the original project, but it’s also become a set of active research projects. Out of the archive is run the Mass Observation Project, which is sort of a panel study. Mass Observation maintains a panel of 500 or 600 volunteer writers based across the UK who, every three or four months, are sent a ‘directive’ consisting of a suggestion of topics to write about. These ‘directive responses’ are sent back in and added to the archive. There is also the 12th May project, which asks people across the UK to keep a day-diary every 12th May and send that in to the archive.

The other archive and research project covered by the Special Section is the Everyday Life in Middletown project. The original Middletown study of Muncie, Indiana was completed by Robert and Helen Lynd in the 1920s. It actually influenced the foundation of Mass Observation in the 1930s. One of the first projects of the original Mass Observation was the ‘Worktown’ study of Bolton, which took its title from Middletown. The original Middletown study was a community study of Muncie, Indiana, which sought to study life in general in a small American city and to trace how life was changing in the 1920s in the context of industrialization.

Since then there have been numerous Middletown studies and the Everyday Life in Middletown project is one of the latest or most recent of those. It was established in 2016 and also runs a panel of volunteer writers.

HHS: What are distinctive about Mass Observation and Middletown as human sciences?

This is a question we try to address in the introductory article to the Special Section. The original Mass Observation had a number of characteristics that mark it out as a distinctive human science. For the purposes of this interview I’ll focus on a particular framing we use, which I think previous writing about Mass Observation has never quite fully developed. This framing is the idea of the original Mass Observation as a science ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. ‘Of the people’: this basically meant to focus on the everyday lives of ordinary people. ‘By the people’: this was achieved in the way Mass Observation attempted to use ordinary people to collect observations about everyday life. These were the mass observers who were recruited to do a kind of citizen science, if you like. Thirdly, ‘for the people’: in that Mass Observation sought to publish these observations as widely as possible, including back to the mass observers who had been making these observations in the first place.

If we think about the contemporary Mass Observation, there are a whole series of characteristics that distinguish it as a particular human science, but it still continues to focus on the everyday lives of ordinary people and continues to mobilize people as mass observers or writers. Perhaps what it does less than the original Mass Observation is publish that writing widely. It’s still ‘of the people’ and ‘by the people’, but perhaps there’s a bit less emphasis on it being ‘for the people’.

The original Middletown study was distinctive as a human science, informed by functionalist cultural anthropology. The Lynds focused on the majority population in Muncie. They produced an account that excluded minorities. The Everyday Life in Middletown project, which is influenced by that original study, is also its own study with its own distinctive human science. It also focuses on the everyday lives of ordinary people in Middletown, but

brings to the foreground the idea that Middletown is a particular place. It is not typical America, but one particular community; a community now characterized by industrial decline, class conflict and provincialism.

The Everyday Life in Middletown Project is influenced by Mass Observation, both the original and contemporary versions, and makes an effort to publish all of the writing that it collects back to those people doing the writing, and it does that digitally. They call it the ‘digital commons’. It is very much trying to practice that democratic science ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’.

HHS: How does Rebecca Coleman and Dawn Lyon’s article ‘Rupture, repetition, and

new rhythms for pandemic times: Mass Observation, everyday life, and COVID-19’ use “rhythm as an object and tool of inquiry to make sense of spatio-temporal change”? How did they gather data on people’s experiences of time during the pandemic?

NC: The authors ran a directive on COVID-19 and time through Mass Observation in August 2020. They partnered with the archivists to send out a directive to the panel of volunteer writers, asking a series of open questions about experiences of time during the pandemic. The authors were interested in the centrality of rhythm to experiences of everyday life and in how the pandemic was potentially disrupting the rhythms of everyday life. The writing they got back suggested to them that the pandemic seemed to be rupturing rhythms of everyday life. Many regular activities had been stopped. Many of the panelists were experiencing time during lockdown as monotonous, as lacking in rhythm, so they were finding ways to make new rhythms by, for example, attuning to nature. One of the most interesting things coming through from this article was the way that Dawn and Rebecca found the responses to their directive contained less life-writing than is usually the case in directive responses for Mass Observation, which suggested it was difficult for people to do life-writing during the pandemic. What people seemed to be doing instead in responses to this directive was grappling with a live present, grappling with the unfolding of the pandemic. The writing takes the form of fragments, small stories. I’ve come to think of the Special Section as partly an archiving of those fragments and small stories and initial analyses of those forms.

HHS: In the article you co-wrote with Clive Barnett, ‘Seeing like an epidemiologist? Mobilising people against COVID-19’ you discuss how ordinary people were encouraged to ‘see like an epidemiologist’ – how was this ‘process of translation’ carried out and to what extent was the attempted mobilisation achieved?

NC: This article started from an observation, which was that during the pandemic one means of governing the pandemic in the UK was that citizens were being encouraged it to see ‘like an epidemiologist’: to think in terms of populations and groups; rates, trends, and distributions; the capacity of public services; and complex systems of causation. By saying ‘Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives’, the government was asking people to think in terms of a complex system of causation. All this was being communicated in terms of statistics, charts, maps etc. at press conferences, for example. Citizens were encouraged to develop a kind of scientific literacy to process all of these resources and then to act accordingly.

Clive and I thought that one of the things we might be able to use Mass Observation’s COVID-19 collections to do would be to see how citizens responded to this attempt to govern the pandemic. It might be that the citizens would become kind of an ‘epidemiological public’ with ‘epidemiological imaginations’, that they would come to see like an epidemiologist. But it’s also possible that citizens would develop their own kind of ‘lay epidemiology’ in response to these attempts to govern behavior during the pandemic.

We read as much as we could of these collections and identified a lay epidemiology

that involved confident use of epidemiological terms and concepts by ordinary people: rates, curves, spikes, that kind of thing. But we also found a much more skeptical and reluctant engagement with the subject positions being offered by epidemiology during the pandemic – ideas of vulnerable groups, at-risk groups and so on. I think our conclusion is that mobilization of people as epidemiologists, or translation of the idea of seeing like an epidemiologist, was partial in the way that it worked out during those first eight months of the pandemic.

HHS: Annebella Pollen’s article in the Special Section ‘‘There is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence’: Picturing the pandemic in Mass Observation’s Covid-19 Collections’, looks at visual observation in MO’s COVID-19 collections that take various forms (from photos to drawings to memes) – what does she argue is revealed through the visual culture of COVID-19?

NC: Annebella was interested in how the pandemic was visualized or pictured, so she focused on a particular sample of directive responses and day-diaries in Mass Observation’s COVID-19 collections, responses that included photography, drawing, painting, but also writing about the pandemic’s image cultures and writing that included visual descriptions.

One thing that seemed to be revealed by these materials is a wider pandemic visual culture

in which these materials submitted to Mass Observation was situated. This wider visual culture seems to be comprised of stylized renderings of the spiked spherical virus, photographic documentation of the first stage of the pandemic (empty cities, for example), and also depictions of the main actors of the pandemic, for example, masked healthcare workers. Another thing that’s revealed by these materials is the important role of Mass Observation in that pandemic visual culture. She notes that many of the public photography projects that were set up during the pandemic to collect images and publish them cited the original Mass Observation as an inspiration and justification. Submissions to Mass Observation that the article analyzes were both influenced by a wider pandemic visual culture, but also played an active role in the production of that culture.

The other thing it’s just worth highlighting about this paper is that, similar to the Lyon and Coleman, she notes how a lot of the submissions she was reading contained a kind of live processing of the pandemic and people’s experiences of the pandemic and the questions that the pandemic was posing to people. That’s very similar to Rebecca and Dawn’s observation that what they were reading was a sort of grappling with the live present of an unfolding pandemic.

HHS: Like the Coleman and Lyon article, Patrick Collier and James J. Connolly’s ‘Time shifts: Place, belonging, and future orientation in pandemic everyday life’ looks at experiences of the pandemic from a temporal perspective via materials gathered by the Everyday Life in Middletown project. According to the authors, how were disruptions associated with the pandemic reflected in autobiographical writing?

Collier and Connolly use diaries and directive responses submitted to the Everyday Life in Middletown project to consider how the pandemic distorted experiences of time and place and potentially caused problems for the construction of autobiographical selves in doing so.

During the pandemic people in Muncie seemed to experience the present as confusing because everyday rhythms were disrupted. They didn’t really write much about the future. They seemed to feel disconnected from the future, unable to plan for the future, which is different from what the project would usually receive in terms of autobiographical writing. People writing during the pandemic didn’t write so much about the lifetime; didn’t provide in their writing a sense of continuous life and belonging, which was different to the usual writing that the project would get in response to directives. Ultimately, what Patrick and James suggest is that the pandemic seemed to generate new forms of writing, reflective of new experiences and new forms of relating.

HHS: Finally, a more general question: what were the challenges associated with archiving the pandemic specifically or with analysing archives of the very recent past more generally?

NC: Lots of challenges! One of the challenges was that the pandemic disrupted everyone’s lives, including the lives of researchers and archivists. This is one of the reasons why these projects became so important during the early stages of the pandemic. They were long-standing research projects, organizations and archives. They were already set up. They had an existing infrastructure that allowed for the collection of diaries and other forms of biographical writing during the very early stages of the pandemic, when perhaps setting up something new would have been difficult. There were some ethical challenges to setting up new research projects during the beginning of the pandemic, asking people for their time and asking people to write about a very difficult situation. Mass Observation and the Everyday Life in Middletown project already had panels of volunteer writers and a trusting relationship with those people so it seemed possible to do ethical research and ethical archiving through those organizations.

Now, I’ve talked about those two projects as an opportunity at the beginning of the pandemic, but they are also a constraint. Both of these projects have their own characteristic human sciences; they attract certain participants and certain forms of participation and so they produce a particular account of the pandemic and we have to keep that in mind. I think that’s  why it’s so important to situate these projects in the history of the human sciences.

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.