Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 45.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2023-05-24 08:15:17+00:00
        From: Cecilia Ghidotti <C.Ghidotti@lboro.ac.uk>
        Subject: LUSTRE Online lunchtime talk on Exploring the Digital Record of Everyday Life in Covid-era Britain

Dear all,

We are pleased to invite you to the next LUSTRE online lunchtime talk on
Exploring the Digital Record of Everyday Life in Covid-era Britain which will be
taking place on Wednesday June 14th from 12:30 to 13:30 (UK time). The talk will
be delivered via MS Teams.

The event is organised by the AHRC-funded project Unlocking our Digital Past
with Artificial Intelligence (LUSTRE<https://lustre-network.net/>) led by Dr
Lise Jaillant (Loughborough University). LUSTRE seeks to better understand how
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help improve the preservation, access to and
usability of archives produced in digital form.

The fourth lunchtime event will feature a talk on how future scholars might
approach the digital records of everyday life in Covid-era Britain, led by Helen
McCarthy, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of
Cambridge.

Please use this link to register to the event:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/exploring-the-digital-record-of-everyday-life-in-
covid-era-britain-tickets-641261589677 . Participants will receive the link
shortly before the event.



Please find the full abstract below

 Exploring the Digital Record of Everyday Life in Covid-era Britain

The arrival of Covid 19 in spring 2020 radically altered the conditions of life
for nearly everyone in Britain. From home-schooling and Zoom calls to social
distancing in parks and mask-wearing in shops, the sense of living through
extraordinary times was inescapable. For many, it was accompanied by a powerful
compulsion to bear witness. Curators at the British Library have identified over
a hundred ‘testimony projects’ launched by archives, museums and other
institutions early in the pandemic with a view to capturing and preserving a
diversity of lived experience. To these might be added countless private efforts
by individuals across the country to document their ‘new normal’ through diary-
keeping, journaling, photography and art. Much, although not all, of this
material has adopted a digital form, reflecting the practical constraints on
archival and curatorial work under lockdown, as well the more general pivot
towards virtual worlds necessitated by the virus. In my paper I ask how future
scholars might approach this born-digital archive when they come to write
histories of everyday life in Covid-era Britain. Focusing on the UK Web Archive,
I briefly survey the four thousand websites and social media accounts comprising
its Covid 19 collection before diving deeper into a handful of case studies.
These include a number of personal and collaborative blogs, a crowdsourced
national photography project and a ‘zine produced by Essex teenagers. I will
suggest that this digital archive of what we might call the ‘Covid everyday’ was
configured by a structure of feeling which took powerful shape during the spring
and summer of 2020 and had a democratising impulse and ethic of care at its
heart. When reading this archive in the future we must be mindful of the values
- of kindness, resilience and community - that animated its moment of
construction.



Speaker’s bio:

Helen McCarthy is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University
of Cambridge and author of three books, most recently Double Lives: A History of
Working Motherhood (Bloomsbury, 2020), which was shortlisted for the Wolfson
Prize. She is currently co-editing a special journal issue on Britain in the
Nineties and developing a new book project on the social and cultural history of
retirement in Britain from the 1950s to the present.


More information about the project: https://lustre-network.net/
Join our mailing list: https://lustre-network.net/join/


Kind regards,
Cecilia


Dr Cecilia Ghidotti
LUSTRE Research Associate 
lustre-network.net
School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Loughborough University
Working days: Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday


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