Between Paper and Pixels – Building Community During COVID through SUNY Oneonta’s Pandemic Diary as Blog and Book

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Speakers

Matthew Hendley, Ann Traitor, and Darren Chase

Brief Description

This presentation will examine the cross-disciplinary teamwork behind the creation of a pandemic blog and book based on the experiences of the SUNY Oneonta community during the COVID pandemic between Spring 2020-Spring 2021. It will reflect on the technical, emotional and editorial challenges of creating a living archive, historical record and medium for community self-reflection and expression during a crisis.

Full Abstract

This presentation is an analysis of the process and outcomes of creating a blog and later a book based upon the experience of the SUNY Oneonta campus community during the peak of the COVID pandemic between Spring 2020-Spring 2021.

The presentation will show the importance of cross-disciplinary teamwork that allowed an initial paper-based class assignment centered on students’ COVID pandemic experiences to grow into a blog which included photographs, poetry, diaries and reflections by SUNY Oneonta staff, faculty and students. SUNY Oneonta’s Pandemic Diaries Project was inspired by Mass Observation, a maverick experiment launched in Britain during the 1930s to gather written public observations of everyday life. Mass Observation has become an invaluable set of primary sources for researchers trying to delve into the social history of Britain between 1937-50.

Highlighted in the presentation will be the ability of History faculty, a library director and a digital instructional course designer to work seamlessly together to grow the project. Our presentation will show how the team tackled technical challenges, encouraged submissions and edited entries to present the blog as a living archive which encouraged a sense of community during a moment of crisis for our campus. SUNY Oneonta was the only school in the state that had to send home all its students twice due to COVID (actions which gathered international media attention).

From the original blog project, the Pandemic Diaries Project team signed a book contract with SUNY Press (forthcoming 2023). The book will include over 200 edited blog entries through which the grief, frustration, fear, resilience and life changes of this tumultuous period are laid bare. The book also includes chapters with historical comparisons between the pandemic diaries and the UK Mass Observation experience, themes which recur in the blogs and reflections on the nature of digital humanities and the evolution of the project. The presentation will also reflect on the challenges and opportunities of converting the unstructured digital blog into a book. It will show how the decision to make the book available through multiple formats (including open access) will further enrich historical understanding of this unique moment in time. Finally, it will also reflect upon the different forms of community building and understanding that are possible in either a raw blog form or a historically framed publication such as our book. The presentation highlights conference themes of underrepresented voices, open pedagogy and building confidence.

Session Objectives

At the end of the session, participants will learn of the use of a campus wide blog and its conversion into a book manuscript to nurture a sense of campus community and connection as well as prompt self-reflection by the SUNY Oneonta community during the COVID crisis of 2020-2021. Presenter Headshot

Biography

Dr. Matthew Hendley (PhD, University of Toronto) is Professor of History at the State University of New York – College at Oneonta (SUNY Oneonta). He is a specialist in Modern British History and the history of the British Empire. He is currently researching and writing on the impact of public housing and social reform in colonial Hong Kong from 1971-1982 as well as the parallels between SUNY Oneonta’s response to the COVID pandemic and Mass Observation in the UK. His publications include Organized Patriotism and the Crucible of War: Popular Imperialism in Britain, 1914-1932. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), and the co-edited book Imagining Globalization: Language, Identities and Boundaries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), as well as numerous book chapters and scholarly articles. Professor Hendley’s published work has focused on the gendered nature of British political culture in 20th century Britain. He is one of the co-editors and co-author of three chapters in the forthcoming book SUNY Oneonta’s Pandemic Diaries (SUNY Press, 2023) Dr. Hendley has received a Research and Scholarship Award for excellence in scholarship from Research Foundation of the State University of New York.

Co-Presenter Bios

Ann Traitor (ABD, University at Albany) is an Assistant Adjunct Professor at SUNY Oneonta. Her research specializations are in anti-Soviet underground resistance movements in the Baltic states and religious history. She is currently working on a monography entitled “Enlisting the Support of the mAsses: Father Sigitas Tamkevicius and the Kronika” which examines a Lithuanian Catholic underground religious publication which documented the persecution of Lithuanian Catholics by the state in the last twenty years of the Soviet Union. She is a board member of the Lithuanian Catholic Academy of Sciences and is an active member of and occasional book reviewer for The Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS) and a frequent contributor to Draugas News, a cultural magazine of the Lithuanian-American community. She first came up with the idea for the SUNY Oneonta pandemic diaries.

Darren Chase is a librarian. He is the director of the James M. Milne Library at SUNY Oneonta. His research and professional interests include intellectual freedom, library design, scholarly communications and information literacy.

Session Notes

Attending the presentation? Take shared notes in this Google Doc and view the final notes below.