Sneller & Wagner | MI Diaries: Starting a Community-Engaged DH Project during a Global Pandemic
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2022-05-03

Betsy Sneller and Suzanne Wagner | Michigan State University, USA

Since April 2020, the MI Diaries project (run out of the Michigan State University Sociolinguistics Lab) has been collecting weekly “audio diaries” from residents across Michigan, with the goal of tracking how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the lives and the language of Michiganders. MI Diaries was designed from the outset to center community engagement as a major component of the research, which to date has included partnering with community-oriented programs like 4-H to incorporate MI Diaries into ongoing youth programming and involving high school students as “Youth Intern” research assistants. The project also selects a handful of submitted stories to feature on our website, resulting in an ongoing public archive of weekly stories from the duration of the pandemic.

Starting a community-engaged Digital Humanities project rapidly and remotely came with a number of specific and novel challenges, such as ensuring high-quality audio recordings that can be used for acoustic analysis, recruiting participants remotely, and the even more difficult task of retaining and building rapport with participants remotely. In this talk, we discuss some of these challenges and the steps we took to address them. We also discuss some of the unexpected opportunities that we encountered in the development of MI Diaries, many of which emerged from specific challenges. These include centering cross-disciplinarity and community engagement as core elements of the project. We end with a brief tour of our public archive, which is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, to facilitate non-commercial re-use with attribution. Our aim is to connect with other scholars in the Digital Humanities and consider additional ways for the project to expand and for new collaborations to arise.

For more information about the 2022 Global DH Symposium visit msuglobaldh.org