Abstract
Abstract The Lothian Diary Project is an interdisciplinary effort to collect self-recorded audio or video diaries of people’s experiences of COVID-19 in and around Edinburgh, Scotland. In this paper we describe how the project emerged from a desire to support community members. The diaries have been disseminated through public events, a website, an oral history project, and engagement with policymakers. The data collection method encouraged the participation of people with disabilities, racialized individuals, immigrants, and low-proficiency English/Scots speakers, all of whom are more likely to be negatively affected by COVID-19. This is of interest to sociolinguists, given that these groups have been under-represented in previous studies of linguistic variation in Edinburgh. We detail our programme of partnering with local charities to help ensure that digitally disadvantaged groups and their caregivers are represented. Accompanying survey and demographic data means that this self-recorded speech can be used to complement existing Edinburgh speech corpora. Additional sociolinguistic goals include a narrative analysis and a stylistic analysis, to characterize how different people engage creatively with the act of creating a COVID-19 diary, especially as compared to vlogs and other video diaries.
Highlights
Sociolinguistic studies based on self-recorded data are growing
The diaries have been disseminated through public events, a website, an oral history project, and engagement with policymakers
The data collection method encouraged the participation of people with disabilities, racialized individuals, immigrants, and lowproficiency English/Scots speakers, all of whom are more likely to be negatively affected by COVID-19
Summary
Sociolinguistic studies based on self-recorded data are growing. While much of the data collection in our field has been in-person, face-to-face, and driven by our own interview questions and tasks, the idea behind selfrecordings is to obtain speech data less constrained in these ways. Previous work argues that self-recordings can result in a wider range of styles than results from other speech elicitation methods (Boyd et al 2015; Hall-Lew and Boyd 2017, 2020). They happen to be an ideal means of data collection during a global pandemic. Speakers have more freedom to select which topics to cover and how to present themselves on the recording, on, say, a survey For this project, self-recordings were more practical to collect than online interviews, for various reasons. The distorting effects of various conference call technologies on the acoustic signal (De Decker and Nycz 2011; Freeman and De Decker 2021) are avoided here by speakers recording directly to their own devices, which results in recordings sufficiently comparable to professional field-recording equipment (see Sneller et al this issue)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
