The Lothian Diary Project: Investigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Edinburgh and Lothian Residents

Abstract

The ongoing Lothian Diary Project consists of 125+ audio/video recordings collected since May 2020 from residents of Edinburgh and the Lothian counties in Scotland. The diaries comprise self-recorded monologues or semi-structured interviews in which participants discuss their experiences during different stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Recordings were uploaded to an online survey that also collected consent, demographic information, and opinion regarding Covid-related policies. All data marked for reuse are and will be housed in the University of Edinburgh's DataShare and DataVault repositories. A partial deposit is available now and another will be made available upon completion of data collection. Data from consenting participants will form an oral history archive with Museums and Galleries, Edinburgh.

Deep Impact: A Study on the Impact of Data Papers and Datasets in the Humanities and Social Sciences

“…Looking at the disciplines covered (Figure 4), the most productive area for both data papers and research papers in JOHD is undoubtedly Linguistics [L01.559.598]. The category Social Sciences [I01] covers some of the papers that deal with COVID-19 datasets, in terms of social and cultural effects on specific communities [62], the impact on social media [63], and the spread of fake news and their detection [64]. These papers were published in JOHD's special collection 'Humanities Data in the time of COVID-19' 18 In the case of RDJ, the classification through MeSH revealed a different pattern.…”

Imagining the city in lockdown: Place in the COVID-19 self-recordings of the Lothian Diary Project

“…The data collection process was geared toward public engagement: prioritizing financial support for participants and local charities, offering free citizen science training and awards for young people, producing a report and roundtable event for the Scottish Parliament, and creating an oral history archive. The multidisciplinary academic team of sociolinguists, data scientists, political analysts, and health scientists are using the resulting corpus (Hall-Lew et al, 2021 ) to address a range of theoretical and methodological questions (Markl and Lai, 2021 ; Hall-Lew et al, 2022 ; Markl, 2022 ). For the purposes of the chronotopic analysis we employ in this paper, it is important to note that all of the diaries analyzed in the current paper were recorded between May and July 2020 (the latter months of the first lockdown in the Lothians), unlike others in the full sample which were made between August 2020 and July 2021, a period during which public policies and public attitudes toward COVID-19 shifted considerably.…”

Sociolinguistic prompts in the 21stcentury: Uniting past approaches and current directions

“…We note that while the original phrasing "between the sexes" implies a binary understanding of gender and assumption of heterosexual relationships, we call here for a broad interpretation of this category to include all genders and gender relationships.6 Likewise, Hall-Lew et al (2022) obtain participants' "COVID stories". Preliminary analysis of their work suggests that COVID stories may be a high-formality genre(Hall-Lew et al, 2021), though a direct comparison of COVID stories compared to non-COVID stories in the MI Diaries data found no difference in formality(Behnke, 2022).7 Pseudonarratives typically take the form of habitual report, for example, "I used to make sandcastles whenever we went to the beach" which does not fit the definition of narrative inLabov and Waletzky (1967). For in-person sociolinguistic interviews, pseudonarratives present an opportunity to pull out a specific narrative in response.…”

“…(2022) obtain participants' “COVID stories”. Preliminary analysis of their work suggests that COVID stories may be a high‐formality genre (Hall‐Lew et al., 2021), though a direct comparison of COVID stories compared to non‐COVID stories in the MI Diaries data found no difference in formality (Behnke, 2022).…”