From March to June 2020, 18 South African students from under-privileged Black urban and rural communities documented their pandemic experiences. The archive contains over 400 pages of handwritten journal responses to weekly prompts, 89 audio or video interviews, and several dozen photographs. Nancy Jacobs and Lorato Trok organized the project, which was supported by Brown University.
Use Cases
- Analyze personal narratives of pandemic life based on handwritten journal entries.
- Study community-level impacts of COVID-19 based on transcribed audio-video interviews.
- Conduct qualitative research on youth experiences during lockdown based on the multimedia archive.
Strengths
- Over 400 pages of handwritten journal entries provide detailed personal narratives.
- 89 audio or video interviews offer additional perspectives beyond text.
- Data collection spanned 10 weeks, capturing evolving experiences during the early pandemic.
Limitations
- Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
- Data may reflect geographic and demographic bias inherent to the specific participant selection.
Provenance
- Source
- Jacobs, Nancy J.
- Collection Method
- Students hand-wrote journal entries, photographed them, and submitted via WhatsApp, alongside audio-video interviews.
- Time Range
- March to June 2020
- Freshness
- Last updated 2025-10-20 19:58:47; freshness should be verified.
- Geography
- South Africa (urban and rural communities)