May 12, 2021
One of the primary inspirations of the Everyday Life in Middletown Project is Mass Observation, created in the late 1930s by a small group of British artists and thinkers who sought to record and analyze ordinary life in the UK, to create what they called an “anthropology of ourselves.”
Among the group’s first major projects was an effort to capture people’s experiences on May 12, 1937—the day of the coronation of George VI. They recruited volunteers to write accounts of everything that occurred to them that day. EDLM’s primary way of recording everyday life in Muncie—thrice-yearly, one-day diaries—is drawn from this model.
The Mass Observers were motivated by a complicated set of concerns. These included the rise of fascism in continental Europe and the growing volume of fascist voices in England; the sense that the mass media misunderstood and mischaracterized ordinary people’s thoughts and feelings; and the perceived lack of a healthy public culture, where good information (such as basic understandings of science) was widely available to people.
The Mass Observers knew that the daily newspapers would report that Great Britain was absorbed and enraptured by the coronation. They suspected, correctly, that people’s day diaries would tell a different, much more varied and detailed story, registering (some) people’s excitement but also disinterest, boredom, annoyance, and hundreds of other fleeting thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
Mass Observation underwent a series of transformations in subsequent years, becoming part of the British propaganda effort during World War II and ultimately going fallow in the mid-twentieth century before being revived at the University of Sussex in the early 1980s.
Today, Mass Observation continues to survey its 500 permanent volunteers three times a year. And, every May 12, Mass Observation does a massive collection of day diaries from anyone in the U.K. interested in writing. Last year they collected 5,000 diaries, creating perhaps the largest collection in the world of written accounts of the global pandemic.
Staff at Mass Observation have consulted with us at EDLM in multiple ways since our project launched in 2016. EDLM founder Patrick Collier visited the Mass Observation archive in Sussex in 2017, reading in the collections and meeting with staff to discuss public outreach, archiving practices, and data analysis, among other things.
Today is the day of the annual May 12 collection. Our friends at Mass Obs have also made a fascinating set of videos describing the diary project and offering excerpts of last year’s diaries focusing on the themes including hope, loss, creativity, and well-being.
We’ll be looking forward to seeing how this year’s May 12 diaries differ from last year’s, which came at a high point in global anxiety and fear about the pandemic. The UK has taken decisive reopening steps just in the last week, so there’s sure to be a contrast.
On our much smaller scale, we have also been collecting accounts from our volunteers since just after the pandemic began, including three diaries and two directives, the second of which will go live on the archive next week. Stay tuned to this blog for an announcement and some analysis of the latest directive, where we asked our volunteers to discuss how they experience and manage time, and how the pandemic has influenced how time functions and feels.