The Lothian Diary Project: sociolinguistic methods during the COVID-19 lockdown

Abstract

The Lothian Diary Project is an interdisciplinary effort to collect self-recorded audio or video diaries of people’s experiences of COVID-19 in and around Edinburgh, Scotland. In this paper we describe how the project emerged from a desire to support community members. The diaries have been disseminated through public events, a website, an oral history project, and engagement with policymakers. The data collection method encouraged the participation of people with disabilities, racialized individuals, immigrants, and low-proficiency English/Scots speakers, all of whom are more likely to be negatively affected by COVID-19. This is of interest to sociolinguists, given that these groups have been under-represented in previous studies of linguistic variation in Edinburgh. We detail our programme of partnering with local charities to help ensure that digitally disadvantaged groups and their caregivers are represented. Accompanying survey and demographic data means that this self-recorded speech can be used to complement existing Edinburgh speech corpora. Additional sociolinguistic goals include a narrative analysis and a stylistic analysis, to characterize how different people engage creatively with the act of creating a COVID-19 diary, especially as compared to vlogs and other video diaries.

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

“…Among the contributors to the Lothian Diary Project during the first lockdown we see connections to other chronotopic representations of cities as being at a "standstill". As Weichselbraun (2022) observes, "stopping movement in space also somehow produced a sense of stopping time, by stopping/interrupting our quotidian activities, the streets were dead". The main chronotopic shift into lockdown was that time seemed to change quality, or operate differently, than it had before.…”

“…A full description of the Lothian Diary Project corpus and the methods of its collection is available in Hall-Lew et al ( 2022 ). Participation was open to any resident of any background (and any language) residing in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland's capital (2020 population, 488,050) and its surrounding counties, known as the Lothians (2020 population, 413,405).…”

“…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.…”

The Manchester Voices Accent Van: taking sociolinguistic data collection on the road

“…It follows recent projects which have sought to explore both more innovative methods of sociolinguistic data collection, and ways to make sociolinguistic research a public resource. For example, Sneller et al (2022) and Hall-Lew et al (2022) discuss the use of self-recorded diaries (audio and audio-visual respectively) as both sociolinguistic research data, and as a method of recording and exploring different (often marginalised) groups' experiences of Covid-19. Similarly, the QuakeBox Corpus (Walsh et al 2013;Clark et al 2016) consisted of audio and video recordings made in a transportable recording studio in a shipping container.…”

Medium-shifting and intraspeaker variation in conversational interviews

“…Of course, the pandemic has also had an impact on the practice of linguistics, including how researchers elicit and record spoken language data. Recent projects in dialectology and variationist sociolinguistics have already demonstrated the efficacy of remote data collection using participants’ personal devices, including smartphones (Hall-Lew, Cowie, Lai, Markl, McNulty, Liu, Llewellyn, Alex, Elliott, & Klingler, 2022; Leemann, Jeszenszky, Steiner, Studerus, & Messerli, 2020; Nesbitt & Watts, 2022; Sneller, Wagner, & Ye, 2022). Just as online language experiments have become a convenient and cost-effective alternative to those conducted in the laboratory, the practice of eliciting speech over the internet—including in video-mediated sociolinguistic interviews—is likely to remain popular in the future.…”