(The UvA Open Studio. Photo by Geert Snoeijer with permission)
On the 3rd of June 2021 the team of the Covid19 Communities Archive project was asked to give a presentation at the University of Amsterdam’s alumni festival: UvA Open. This festival, which is organized every year, is intended to give alumni of the university an insight into what is and has been happening there after they left. This year’s festival was, to put it mildly, a little bit different from previous editions. Because of the pandemic the festival was purely online and to make it a little more interesting than just another zoom conference the festival’s organizers turned the online event into a talk show complete with a studio set and about five different camera angles.
In the timeslot we were given Julia Noordegraaf was tasked with presenting the show and introducing the ‘guests’ at the table. Since Tobias Blanke was not in the country at that time, he joined via a zoom connection. Tobias first held a talk about the origins of the project and the origins of the digital humanities as a field of research. After a short history and introduction of community archiving project he introduced our platform. Joost Dofferhoff then gave a walkthrough of the submissions platform and explained what is done with the data collected. Lastly Nuala Vlogman talked about the research we did on the Corona in the City collection from the Amsterdam Museum, with special attention for the mental impact of the crisis. At the end of the talk show there was time for a Q&A for which the questions were presented as a live feed to our table. Quite a lot of questions came in, which showed that many alumni in the audience are interested in our project. The event was a great moment for us to show what we have been doing during the pandemic and motivated us to continue collecting citizen’s experiences with this unique period in history.
The recording of the event is available here: