A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19 as a Community of Practice

In March 2020, I became a part of a group that was simultaneously creating a crowd-sourced digital archive and a community of practice. Our archive collects material from the COVID-19 pandemic and we are, of course, working in the midst of that pandemic. We are working to create a community and a resource during a time that threatened alienation, isolation, and uncertainty. In this article, I will describe ways in which my experience bears out recent writing on the value of communities of practice, while also noting some ways in which my experience, which took place within a formal academic institution as well as within a community of practice, has been distinctive.

When the pandemic began, we had to figure out how to curate an ongoing, rapidly changing experience while isolated physically from others. We also had to expand the project to include many voices and experiences while still maintaining academic and curatorial excellence. A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19 (JOTPY) is unique yet not unprecedented, drawing as it does from other archives, digital or physical, created in response to an event and based on rapid collection. ¹ It created an opportunity for those involved to learn how to work quickly and efficiently in this digital space, rapidly collecting and following ethical and academic principles in uncertain times.

My experience with JOTPY has shown me the importance of the role of a “community of practice” in learning and creating. First coined by social scientists to describe learning models, the idea of a “community of practice” is used in many areas of learning, both in formal training practices and in workplace settings. The basis of these ideas is that community members learn by doing and interacting centered around a shared passion, premise or domain. ² Wegner-Trayner first used this model to describe the role of the master-apprentice relationship and the passing of knowledge within a trade, and then applied these theories to include other forms of learning such as in academia, where knowledge is passed from ranked professors to graduate students wishing to join those ranks. In these traditional hierarchical roles, the most impactful learning actually occurs not from master to apprentice, but through side by side learning, or shared community. By temperament an observer and by rank a graduate student, I found that the shared authority model common to public history projects and JOTPY’s community of practice drew me toward an active and increasingly assertive engagement in shaping the nature and outcomes of our work. At the same time, my training as an educator and my observation of community members’ challenges prompted me to create opportunities for explicit, teacher/student format instruction.

Having few skills in digital collecting or archiving, I began this project intending to support the experts and learn everything I could in the process. One of the first tasks was to set up communication within our digital community and to onboard new participants. Organizing and onboarding were in my comfort zone, and I set out to be helpful and learn the processes as a student and not necessarily a shareholder. This process allowed me to see the width and depth of the project. The variety of contributors and partners, and the items they contributed, created a rich and varied archive.

At the beginning of the project, I would only observe and listen during town hall meetings, but as my role grew I began to share ideas and processes with the larger group. Due to the digital format of the archive, the isolation due to the pandemic and the democratizing format of Zoom meetings, the project quickly turned into a community of practice that altered our traditional hierarchies of the academic world with which we were comfortable. When all participants are faces within equally sized squares on a screen or names on an email chain, it is easier to loosen the constraints of the professor-student relationship. I joined discussions on ethics and metadata to help define the purpose of curating while experimenting with what worked or not to create the actual process. I transformed from solely a learner to a teacher among teachers and professionals by teaching others to work within the archive, demonstrating what happens when communities of practice use their collective knowledge and abilities to push a project forward. ³ I also found that not only did I, an apprentice, have the ability to train other students, I also began teaching some of the professors our curating processes, which upended traditional learning models. This was awkward for me, but because the community understood that it benefitted everyone for me to share what I was learning and how our shared contributions could make the archive successful, the awkwardness was all mine. Leaving the comfort zone of the helpful observer, I forced myself to learn the tools needed to work within the archive, share what I knew with others and help the experts create processes that ease their workflow and allow their work to shine. I also benefited from their expertise, and they were all generous with their knowledge and time.

In March and April of 2020, the community of practice centered around a small but growing group of graduate students and faculty attached to the project. Arizona State University’s “curatorial fellows” included a diverse array of graduate students who were funded by the University or worked on the project for course credit. This cohort included both online and onsite students. This group started working through the steps needed to curate the items as they came into the archive, establishing best practices as we went. Part of the process included learning about and discussing broad theoretical ideas centered around privacy, copyright and ethics while simultaneously curating submitted items. The curating we did in this early stage was focused on the appropriate ways to assign metadata, how to use the metadata to describe objects and how to collect these stories.

While I enjoyed the intellectual discussions that emerged, it was in the details and processes that I spent most of my time and energy. As we moved into more thorough curating, we had to reach a consensus on making the items findable and useful without changing the contributor’s intended meaning. This involved working through the process as a team by giving feedback and asking questions to create a curatorial practice that is thorough, transferable across item types and shareable with new curators. Reaching out to experts as needed helped shape the process, and in some cases, the experts would reach out to those of us in the weeds of curating to figure out best practices. What began as a light touch curation process in March turned into a thirty-page curating checklist document by June 2020. This adjustment reflects the thought and care that each curator pours into the archive. The thorough checklist also productively combines the collective strengths of a community of practice with the regularization and codification valued by institutions such as a university.

Mark Tebeau, Associate Professor of History at ASU, was the coordinator of our efforts and would suggest to each of us areas we could focus on, phrasing it in terms of a “project need.” This freedom to meet needs versus do assigned work allowed each of the students to find areas of interest, which in turn produced more exceptional results. Students would work on the day to day curating, but with the freedom to explore their interests and a focus on future work. The fellows were able to turn their interests into an exhibit or page, which would create a template for future collections and create smaller, more focused communities of practice. ⁴

In May 2020, fifteen graduate students from ASU joined the project as part of an academic internship. We took the curating steps and taught the interns the processes and thought behind them, sometimes as we were fine-tuning the process. This expanded our community of practice to include the new learners, the interns, and thereby turning those of us with experience into the teachers. The process included creating smaller groups with an experienced curator acting as a mentor who offered instruction, feedback and support. As the new curators learned the curation process, they too turned into teachers, often helping each other with issues. They were learning by doing, as the fellows had done in the first weeks.

The first process we used in training the interns was time-consuming and repetitive, as it was done in isolation and on an individual basis. Because of the nature of the project, we relied heavily on written communication instead of real-time interaction. Having worked through the processes initially, we did not realize how foreign some ideas were to the new students. An important lesson we learned was that face-to-face instruction, even if done remotely, was much more useful than written instruction, at least in the first curating attempts. We were also adjusting our curatorial practices while we were teaching the interns, which created more confusion. While the community of practice model was valuable to the overall project, it was disruptive to the more traditional teaching of the interns we were trying to accomplish. The pitfalls we ran into while training the interns became part of the learning, and we adjusted our methods as a result. As we are currently training a new set of interns, we are relying on the original set of interns to help teach them, thereby creating a wider community of teachers within JOTPY.

Teaching the curating process was one of my primary roles within the project, but I also wanted to expand my role to help groups use the archive as a tool in their own work or institutions. The JOTPY community by June 2020 consisted of faculty and graduate students from ASU and around the country as well as museum professionals, librarians, secondary educators, and others. I felt that teachers and students especially could use the archive as a learning tool and resource, and as a repository for their pandemic related content. As a former teacher, this community appealed to me, and I was able to articulate the specific needs of teachers to others that have never been in a classroom and establish processes for educators and their students. We created a workflow that allowed for classroom submissions from a wide range of academic levels and included a system for tagging items with their institution name and class designation. These tags created a connecting link between all items submitted from that school and a smaller grouping of all items explicitly submitted for that class, making items searchable by class name, class type, or institution. This system is useful for teachers currently in the classroom and future researchers who can use it to see change and processes over time and place. By creating an organized, consistent method of accepting students’ contributions, we ease the burden on teachers and professors and make the archive a tool they can access as needed. There were a few educators that joined the project as interns in May, and they were able to take these guidelines and create a site within JOTPY, called “Teaching the Pandemic.” The site includes lesson plans for elementary through college levels, a curated set of items that could be interesting (and age-appropriate) for teachers to use, tips for students and teachers in sharing stories, and useful links. ⁵

As we added individual and institutional partners to the project, we repeated the steps we took in creating the education processes and applied what we learned to create spaces for new groups. I am often involved in helping these new partners establish curating practices and methods of collection, which has expanded my landscape of practice to include museum work, journalism stories, photography exhibits, and immigrant rights issues. ⁶ With each of these groups, I worked out issues with each type of item and the best way to highlight items within a collection that also acknowledges the partner institution. We are currently working on creating a “Museum and Cultural Institutions” site within JOTPY that, similar to the teaching site, can be a landing place for those in the field and make JOTPY more accessible and useful. Whether cultural institutions want to share their already completed work or want to work with us to create items, we have a system and process ready to create the plan.

A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19 (JOTPY) operates and thrives within a community that shares the common goal of creating a crowd-sourced, digital, rapid-response archive in unprecedented times. What we can do as a community while socially isolated is astounding, and coordination cost—the cost of coordinating a group of people to create something valuable—are extremely low in this digital world. The collaboration itself becomes part of the project and helps create the output. ⁷ JOTPY will likely experience more adjustments and change as it grows. However, our curating procedures and community of practice model will carry through these changes. In moving from learner to teacher within the archive, and then expanding the educational aspect beyond curating, I learned the benefits of collaboration and how stepping in to share strengths is just as valuable as stepping back to listen to experts. A Journal of the Plague Year shows that a shared vision among a community of practice can create a lasting, valuable resource.