Archiving Uncertainty: Leveraging Crowdsourcing Methodology in Documenting Personal Experiences of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic, declared a global crisis by the World Health Organization on 11 March 2020, dramatically altered society’s daily routines, social interactions, and digital media consumption. This paper aims to evaluate how leveraging crowdsourcing techniques in combination with digital archiving strategies can effectively capture real-time autobiographical reflections during a period of crisis. The study focuses on the formation of the Latvian Pandemic Diary Collection, initiated through an open-call crowdsourcing initiative that was launched on 17 March 2020 to collect people’s recordings of their personal thoughts and emotional responses in this period of profound change and uncertainty. Methodologically, the project employed a versatile rapid-response crowdsourcing framework and dynamic digital archiving strategy, coupled with an intense outreach and social media campaign to encourage diary submissions.  The diary project has resulted in an open-access digital collection of 2,333 daily entries by 238 participants, offering unique insights into the societal shift towards digital modes of professional, social, and educational interaction in response to the pandemic’s constraints. Although the methodology applied proved effective in eliciting relatively widespread public engagement, difficulties became apparent in relation to the scalability of the approach and getting different segments of society to participate in the project through the crowdsourced-driven digital collection of autobiographical narratives in a rapidly changing social context.