Preserving Collective Memory in the Shadow of Pandemic--Priya Gupta and Peer Zumbansen Launch the Online "CoronaJournal"

"Time just flies now. As as the time is now, “let’s make this moment last”. Because living through this “time takes too much time”, and it appears to me how valuable it might be to have an open, transnational diary that collects our impressions of the lives we live now. But, it might also be the platform for an anatomy of the crisis, its before, its now and how we might be able to shape the after." (The Journal’s Beginning [pzumbansen] First entry: Wednesday, 1 April (no joke), 2020))

So ends the first entry of the brand new Coronajournal, an online journal meant as a collective project that provides multiple first person chronicles of life during the COVID-19 pandemic.  It is curated by Priya Gupta and Peer Zumbansen.  Here is how they describe the new Journal:
 

Today, Priya and I have launched an online platform – CoronaJournal – which will likely just add to all of our never ending wish-I-had-time-to-write-let-alone-read obligations and may just as well go nowhere. But, we got the idea from spending – like everyone – hours and hours every day reading from people around the world as how they experience the current moment. Much of that, for example, in Twitter, just pops up and is gone again. But, what can you do when you want to hold on and come back to it? Our little wordpress website is meant to be a platform for more or less informal diary / journal entries on we, those we know and others are experiencing this time. Entries can use different formats, include pictures, observations, reflections, links to interesting sites, whatever you would like it to be. Short is good. Our first entry is just to get us started. It does not have to be (that) long.

Here is the link to the site: https://crisis-diary.net/

Submissions should be sent to coronajournal@yahoo.com. We are still learning how to make the submissions process for blog entries more effective…. When you make a submission, please be so kind to include a short byline with your name and which city you are writing from. That would be great!

Thanks!

Priya Gupta & Peer Zumbansen

I hope you will consider contributing to this marvelous communal effort. The insight that the production, preservation and dissemination of collective memory will be a useful project, especially from those of us usually in the business of understanding rather than producing knowledge is quite powerful.  This enterprise provides us all with the opportunity to move from the analysis to the production of primary sources that cab serve as a small gift from the present to the future.