Pandemic Journaling Project
During the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands contributed personal journal entries to the Pandemic Journaling Project a project organized by the University of Connecticut's Department of English to create a repository of our ownunique records of everyday life during the pandemic.
I wanted to explore whether computational text analysis tools could help us discover patterns that are impossible to notice by reading entries one at a time. Using Mathematica and Wolfram Language, I built an analysis notebook and explored things like word frequencies, contextual bigrams, sentence relationships, and temporal distributions to study how emotions, routines, and perceptions evolved over that time.
I focused on the context surrounding words to better understand the collective human experience. The project showed what we called in that class 'distant reading' which can transform thousands of individual stories into insights that we would never be able to come at by reading entries one at a time.
Walk the analysis
A step-by-step look at the distant-reading notebook: real entries, adjective rankings, the word cloud, and how hope and sadness moved through the year.
The Pandemic Journaling Project collected weekly journals starting in May 2020. For a Digital Humanities course I pulled the entire corpus into Mathematica, cleaned the text, split it into words and sentences, then ran part-of-speech filters, custom bigrams, and word-position plots to see what patterns held across the pile. The entries answered how the coronavirus pandemic was affecting people's lives.
entry 01 of 10
“Today is day 87 since I began quarantine. Philadelphia entered yellow phase of re-entry. Nothing changed for me.”
from Philadelphia
For more entries check the Pandemic Journaling Project