Work related to Everyday Life in Middletown continues on a few fronts.  First, and most important, we’ve scheduled our next Diary Day for Friday, October 22, 2021.  It represents the third set of contributions collected during 2021 (two diaries and a directive).  Look for one more Diary Day before the end of the calendar year.

EDLM’s Directors, Pat Collier and Jim Connolly, presented a paper, “Time Shifts: Future Orientation in Pandemic Everyday Life” to the Using Mass Observation’s Covid-19 Collection Seminar on October 12^th.  It uses the EDLM archive to explore how the pandemic reshaped perceptions of time, including both the short term and the longer term. The Mass Observation Archive, Sussex University, sponsors the seminar, which has primarily featured UK scholars.   The seminar’s organizers have invited us to publish a version of the paper in a volume of the journal History of the Human Sciences.  Stay tuned for more.

We’ve also added some new visualization tools to the site that allow users to explore the archive in different ways.  The image atop this post is one example. For more details, see here.  There’s also another group of visualization tools for examining the earliest diaries we collected (here).  Both sets of tools offer you ways to explore the language employed by our volunteers as they describe their ordinary lives and respond to our queries.