When was the last time you went through your 2020 camera roll?

For me, it was last week, when I was putting together my presentation for the Lancaster University History Department postgraduate conference. This was an opportunity for all of us current MA students to present the current state of our dissertation research in a friendly, low-pressure environment. Since my dissertation research focuses on evaluation of digital archives of the pandemic, I wanted to include some photos from my own COVID experience in my presentation.

I highly recommend going through your photos, calendar, etc. from March/April 2020. Whether or not you ultimately want these memories to be included in any kind of public archive, I encourage you to consider defining your personal COVID archive. What do you want to remember about the COVID experience? What would you tell younger generations about life in the pandemic?

Figure 1: Lockdown meant Mozzie received more attention than ever.

As I write this blog post, it is exactly 5 years from what turned out to be my last day of high school. I had a presentation in first period AP Spanish, after which I went home because I was sick! I remember going to the doctor and them saying that it was almost definitely not "the Coronavirus" (remember when we all said "coronavirus" or "the rona" instead of COVID?), and that they couldn't test me anyways because they had no tests. I stayed home sick for the rest of the week, and my school shut down, initially temporarily, on the Friday afternoon. We eventually were able to retrieve the contents of our lockers by standing, masked, outside the cafeteria and having a trash bag of our possessions handed to us by our principal. Like many of my peers, I have never gone back into my high school -- not out of any disdain or intentional avoidance, it just never became part of the alumni culture for my class year because of our abrupt departure.

Figure 2: An outdoor high school graduation, extremely long hair courtesty of lockdown.

Beyond my own camera roll, I've been thinking about lockdown YouTube.

Something that I considered including in my dissertation research, but ultimately needs to be cut for time (and word limit constraints!) is the idea of YouTube as an informal archive of COVID lockdown. In general, I think COVID made me interact with video a lot more. Obviously, we were using Zoom/Skype/Teams constantly, and nowhere near every Zoom call is or should be archived. But, what about all the wonderful resources that we gained because traditionally in-person conferences became YouTube-hosted recordings of Zoom calls? I'm thinking especially of Costume College 2020, which, in creating a pandemic work-around, democratized access to resources that were usually restricted by the barriers of location (usually Los Angeles) and conference fees.

Countless videos unintentionally captured the COVID experience. I recently rewatched Mike's Mic's sequence of furniture building videos from 2020 and was struck that this, too, is a documentation of pandemic lockdown. Mike moves apartments, and, because he lives alone, is continually frustrated by Ikea directions that say assembly requires two people. In the absence of help, he assembles all of his furniture alone, while moving his possessions from his old apartment on foot, one duffel bag of shoes at a time.

An even stronger example of the "accidental archive" phenomenon is Jenny Nicholson's "SPIDERQUEST: Quest for the Man-Sized Spider". Throughout this video, Jenny directly explains the choices she and her traveling companions have made to minimize their COVID risk. She acknowledges that the states they must travel through and to -- namely, Arizona -- are far less cautious about COVID than her native California, and they encounter many unmasked individuals during their adventure. Jenny explains that her whole crew has already had or been exposed to COVID, that they opt to stay in decentralized motels (including a motel comprised of old train cars and a replica western town), and that they are choosing to stay masked, even when outdoors. When the giant plush spider in question is handed off, its former owner is wearing blue latex gloves, in addition to a face mask. At the end of the video, Jenny notes that they all completed a two-week quarantine upon their return, and that none of them had any COVID symptoms.

And then, there were events, hosted on YouTube, that sought to replicate the experience of live entertainment. Josh Ritter, one of my favorite musicians, hosted a weekly live show on YouTube called the Silo Sessions. My family watched this every week, and felt like we were really connected with Josh, his family, and the other fans who tuned in.

I recall watching so many recorded Broadway shows during spring/summer 2020. This was when I became aware of the full recording of Legally Blonde: The Musical, and remember watching it with my mom and just cracking up. The professional recording of Hamilton dropped on Disney Plus in July 2020, and my family scrambled to find anyone with a Disney Plus log-in that we could use to watch it. Andrew Lloyd Webber's production company created The Shows Must Go On!, and made one musical available at a time, usually for 48-hour stretches (I remember that they kept getting requests for Phantom of the Opera, and ended up posting so many clips of the songs that you can basically watch the entire thing in segments on the YouTube channel to this day).

So, check out your own camera roll.

Revisit your COVID YouTube viewing. If you feel like it, write down your thoughts - or don't. One thing that I'm being very conscious of in my dissertation is that COVID was extremely traumatic, and not everyone wants to share their memories of that time with the world. As Eira Tansey says, nobody owes their trauma to archivists. But, if you've had a sudden urge to make a loaf of sourdough or miss the work-from-home days, I say it's ok to lean in to the COVID nostalgia -- enjoy a Dalgona whipped coffee for me.