Lothian Diary Project
Capturing experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic in the Lothians
Between April 2020 and December 2022, I was part of the Lothian Diary Project: an interdisciplinary team at the University of Edinburgh. Between April 2020 and July 2021 we compiled almost 200 audio and video diaries from residents in the Lothians regions, telling us about how their lives had been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and, in particular, the lockdowns. These rich accounts informed a policy brief to the Scottish government, several academic publications (including one about the data collection method, one about narratives of place and one about using automatic speech recognition) and an open-access dataset.
In late 2022 we also organised a series of public events, including an exhibition showcasing some of the contributions.