by Sandra Young
In this blog post (published 24 March 2025 by the Mass Observation Archive), Concept Analytics Lab shares how researchers can explore the Covid-19 diaries collected during the pandemic in order to better understand how everyday people experienced that time.
When researchers compared pandemic diaries to ones from the previous decade (2010–2019), a list of key terms included words like lockdown, Zoom, furlough, social distancing, and home schooling. These highlight not just what people were dealing with, but how they were trying to make sense of a completely new and strange situation. By looking at how words like Zoom were used in context, such as with work meetings, online classes, or even quizzes and parties, we get a better idea of what daily life actually looked like.
Some terms show how regular activities suddenly became more important. Things like daily walks or video calls stood out in a time when social lives moved online. Phrases such as strange times and normal people reveal how diarists were navigating the weirdness of life under lockdown.
The blog also introduces ConceptCruncher, a tool developed at the Concept Analytics Lab that maps out the main themes in the 2020 diaries compared to earlier years (see Figure 1).
We identify conceptual patterns and change in human thought through a combination of distant text reading and corpus linguistics techniques.
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