“I Wanted to Be Part of Not Forgetting”: Digital Mediation and Memory in Post-Pandemic Times

Abstract

Using focus groups, I examine how a diverse group of adults from a major American East Coast city engaged with oral pandemic narratives from Corona Diaries, a digital archive launched in March 2020. Participants reported that listening to the stories from the archive helped them process personal memories of COVID-19 and reflect on the pandemic’s politicization in the present. The recordings also prompted new critical understandings of illness, loss, incarceration, and other pandemic-related experiences. These findings suggest that digital archives may not only preserve individual experiences but may also aid in fostering future collective reflection and commemoration practices that center listening, dialogue, and local engagement to ground communities’ connections to traumatic events. The discussion explores how crisis moments can provide generative opportunities for researchers to experiment with critical, collaborative, and creative methods for understanding the individual and collective experiences of a given crisis beyond its unfolding.

Introduction: COVID-19 and Digital Memory

2020 marked the beginning of a pandemic that forced people globally to contend with isolation and an unknown disease at a rate not seen since the 1918 Flu pandemic of the early 20th century. Borders closed with little warning, leaving many travelers, international students, and other migrants with few options. As the world contemplated solitude in pandemic times, people took to social media and digital platforms to voice their frustrations with fluctuating local pandemic measures and their disapproval with the government’s inability to combat disinformation about the new virus (Gisondi, 2022). Digital outlets also provided space for people in the United States and globally to show solidarity with protest movements against racism and police brutality that exploded after the death of George Floyd (Anderson et al., 2020; Gerbaudo, 2020; Krieger, 2020). Amidst these tumultuous times, public and private institutions sought digital submissions in the form of diaries, photos, recordings, stories, and interviews from the public related to the pandemic (Adams & Kopelman, 2022; Zumthurm, 2021).

These early crowdsourced efforts to collect and preserve memories of the pandemic point to the growing importance of “digital memory” in mediating global crises (Reading, 2011) and managing public health crises (Tsui et al., 2025). Of particular importance to this article is how digital pandemic archives may facilitate creative memory practices in future public COVID-19 commemoration efforts.

Due to the proliferation and accessibility of “memory” instantiated by digital archives (Assmann, 2008; Hoskins, 2009), “remembering” has taken on a nuanced role in the lives of individual internet users. Users not only engage with digital memory artifacts when and how they wish, but they can also add their own creative imprint on them as well (De Kosnik, 2021). While some scholars like Hoskins and Halstead (2021) have argued that this new digital memory environment does not fully grapple with “risks related to ownership, use, access, costs and finitude of digital data” (p. 676), others have praised this digital environment for allowing different types of individualized commemorative practices (De Kosnik, 2021; Reading, 2011; Schwarzenegger & Lohmeier, 2020). If archives have gone rogue, and “memory” along with it because of the digital turn, De Kosnik (2021) argues that in going rogue, they have become more emphatically female, queer, immigrant, diasporic, and transnational (p. 10). This has led to the growth of different articulations of memory, what Schwarzenegger (2016) refers to as the “polyphony of memory,” in the cultural realm. Digital media is crucial to this, as it is a site of both mediated memories and the “negotiation [of] the relationship between self and culture” (Van Dijck, 2004, p. 273). These gradual changes in memory culture have destabilized top-down approaches to memory that previously relied on material artifacts and tangible archives (see Assmann, 2008) and made the average person a critical component in the making of memory (Schwarzenegger & Lohmeier, 2020, p. 136).

The digital turn in memory culture gained further traction during the COVID-19 pandemic, engendering interest from different academic disciplines, though the literature on digital memory during the pandemic tends to fall into two camps: The role of digital technologies in mediating and archiving the COVID-19 crisis (Acker & Flamm, 2021; Adams & Kopelman, 2022; Giannini & Bowen, 2022; Zumthurm & Krebs, 2022) or the scope, makeup, and mandates that instigated the digital collections themselves (Kim et al., 2022; Kole De Peralta, 2021; Post & Hof-Mahoney, 2022; Roigé et al., 2024; Zumthurm, 2021). Some scholars, rather than concentrating on the digital technologies, focus on the participants that contributed to the COVID-19 collections, examining how they facilitated belonging and cultural exchange (Stollfuß, 2021) and helped communities endure stringent lockdown measures (Yang, 2022). Others point to how, through these digital archives, listening became one of the dominant modalities of processing the pandemic (Ward, 2021) because of niche soundscapes made possible by a more isolated world (Droumeva, 2021). According to Sagesser (2022), this novel auditory reality of the pandemic instigated a culture that was more sensitive to listening to others.

As memory and commemoration continue to undergo massive shifts in the digital age, (Fridman & Gensburger, 2023; Hoskins & Halstead, 2021; Rumsey, 2016), potentially changing our relationship to individual and collective memory moving forward, the literature can more sufficiently explore the future uses of digitally mediated COVID-19 memories (see Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013), particularly how they might be integrated into educational institutions meant to safeguard collective memory, like schools, libraries, and museums. This integration may prove unavoidable as demarcations separating the realm of individual memory from the realm of collective memory increasingly loosen because of digital technologies (Van Dijck, 2004, 2007), necessitating a more empowering approach that holds both versions of memory equally important.

While previous studies have demonstrated the importance of individual active participation in memory making processes on digital platforms (Adams & Kopelman, 2022), in digital exhibitions (Reading et al., 2021), and within museums (Giannini & Bowen, 2022), this article demonstrates one way that active participation, that is, how memory is continuously re-constituted and expanded depending on how a participant relates to the digital memory artifact, can be primed in memory environments. Critically, this article does not illustrate how memories are agreed on. Rather, it shows instead “the communicative processes in which an understanding of the past is shaped or [..] reimagined through a media and communication lens,” (Keightley et al., 2019, p. 138). This in turn will reveal how collective memory contexts may increasingly rely on creative interactions between digital technologies and individual selfhood and memory within the wider socio-cultural environment (Keightley et al., 2019). Thus, this article asks: how can COVID-19 digital archives function as critical repositories for memory institutions, and consequently lead to a better understanding of the role of digital technologies in mediating memory during future crisis events? To investigate this question, this study utilizes focus groups to understand how adults, from Philadelphia, responded to a selection of oral pandemic stories from Corona Diaries, a digital archive that was launched in March 2020 and is still accepting submissions.

Method: A Three-Way Asynchronous Dialogue Using Focus Groups

Corona Diaries, a platform and digital archive, is just one of many global, open-access, and crowdsourced efforts that provided a means for spatially dispersed voices to document their pandemic experiences by recording an oral story related to COVID-19 (Corona Diaries, 2020). This digital archive was specifically chosen over other digital pandemic collections because of the affordances of sound and its ability to “bring us into the living world” (Sterne, 2012, p. 9). As Crawford (2009) argues, engaged listening allows one to immerse oneself more intimately with the textures of everyday life and is a significant practice of networked connection and communication. This is because listening can provide information, similar to written text, while also “providing the additional affective, sensory information […] that often requires a slowness and attention that text and video do not” (Gershon, 2013, p. 259).

Between March 2021 and July 2022, I collected 153 U.S. based audio diaries from Corona Diaries. Diaries from Puerto Rico are included in that original sample of 153, and it is worth noting that an overwhelming majority of the diaries emerged from the Northeast, perhaps because the platform emerged from a collaboration between fellows at Harvard Neiman Foundation and the MIT Media Lab (Carlson, 2020). Two rounds of open and axial inductive coding, closely modeled after Corbin and Strauss’s (1990) evaluative criteria for qualitative coding, resulted in three categories of diaries from the sample that focused on the toll of social isolation, the yearning for community during lockdown, and different forms of precarity related to financial, academic, or medical uncertainty during the pandemic. These categories were not discreet; some diary entries fall into multiple categories, and some were contained within one. Nevertheless, these three categories encapsulated the major ways in which Corona Diaries respondents reflected on their pandemic experiences. Out of the original sample of 153, purposive sampling was used to select 10 audio diaries, each two to 7 minutes long, that reflected one or more of the aforementioned categories. It is worth highlighting that the research findings, rather than being based solely on the content of the audio diaries themselves, are grounded in the participants’ listening experiences and the utility they derived from engaging with the oral digital archives. This is in line with other studies (see e.g., Orgad et al., 2025) that have used focus group listening as a research method. Critically, the article seeks to understand how participants make connections between the archive’s content and their own experiences.

Participants were recruited for three focus groups, through a mix of local ads, snowball sampling, and classroom enlistment. In total, 22 participants were recruited, and each person was given a fifty-dollar gift card for their participation. Seven people participated in the first focus group, six people participated in the second, and nine people participated in the final session. Fifteen of the participants identified as women, six identified as Men, and one person identified as Non-Binary. Ten of the participants identified as Black, one identified as Latino, seven identified as Asian, one identified as White, and three identified as Mixed race White and Asian. Three of the 22 participants chose not to report their age, but the highest self-reported age was 60, and the lowest self-reported age was 19. The average age of those who did report their age was thirty-one.

While one of the focus groups took place in person, the final two were conducted over Zoom to accommodate participants’ schedules and minimize concerns about the spread of illnesses. As scholars like Gray et al. (2020) and Oliffe et al. (2021) have noted, online focus groups offer participants the opportunity to contribute to discussions from the comfort of familiar settings, which has the potential to deepen reflection (Marques et al., 2021) and engagement (Archibald et al., 2019) once rapport has been established (Boland et al., 2022). However, these familiar settings also run the risk of diverting participants from the focus group discussion, as “real” life needs, such as caring for children, work, or sudden emergencies, compete for their attention (Bolin et al., 2023). To minimize this, participants in this study were asked to keep their Zoom video on for the duration of the discussion portion of the session. While many did, some preferred to remain unseen due to internet connectivity issues and privacy preferences, while others chose to contribute to the discussion by sending typed comments in the Zoom chat, which occasionally interrupted the flow of the discussion. Nevertheless, these alternative ways of contributing ensured that everyone willing to participate could do so at a level they felt comfortable with. In short, the use of Zoom technology for online focus groups required flexibility on the part of the Researcher (Reñosa et al., 2021) and a willingness to adapt to issues arising from connectivity and concerns about privacy.

Ten selections from Corona Diaries, each approximately two to 7 minutes long, were played in a closed setting for the group of 6–9 adults from the Philadelphia area between 2023 and 2024. To guide their listening experience, prior to the start of the session, participants were asked to pay particular attention to stories that resonated or unsettled them. I also encouraged participants to engage with all the background sounds they heard in the recordings. This was intended to encourage them to think about the entirety of the recording, and not just the spoken content. Finally, Participants were asked to write down their initial thoughts after each recording was played once. A discussion on the content and listening experience occurred after all 10 recordings had been played. All three focus groups were recorded, and the notes taken by each participant were collected at the end. The recorded discussions were transcribed using Zoom software, manually edited to aid comprehension, then thematically analyzed along with the collected notes.

I envision my method as a three-way asynchronous dialogue between the archive, the respondents, and me, the researcher. By “dialogue,” I mean a discursive space in which the meaning and the impact of these oral stories are negotiated with openly and frankly from different standpoints (see Back, 2007; Clifford, 1983). This multipronged approach is in part due to my insistence on adopting a post-critique (Felski, 2015; Felski & Anker, 2017) orientation for the article. In the latter’s work, they urge researchers to explore “new models and practices […] that are less beholden to suspicion and skepticism [and] more willing to avow the creative, innovative, world-making aspects” of scholarship (Felski & Anker, 2017, p. 20). This closely aligns with the assertion that any phenomenon under study “pulls the researcher with it, so that the phenomenon and the researcher unfold, co-produce and emerge with the results together” (Østern et al., 2021).

As Orgad et al. (2025) explain, the collective construction of meaning and knowledge via the prism of the participants local contexts (as cited in Ackerly et al., 2006) render focus group participants that engage in close listening and dialogue particularly useful for the studies of crises. Thus, my use of focus groups and the subsequent thematic analysis of the discussion and of the participant notes that follow strives to be emphatically interlocutory and co-constitutive of the researcher’s and the participants’ thoughts, as well as of the diverse experiences of the digital archive. This multipronged approach subtly departs from Davis’s (2016) vision of focus groups as a gateway to being immersed in peoples’ perspectives by “approximating an understanding of communication in vivo [while] in a laboratory setting” (p. 2). I show instead how research findings can be bolstered through an acknowledgment of the ways a researcher’s presence and participation shape the study discussion (Rakow, 2011, p. 422).

Although Corona Diaries exists as an open-source platform and archive and the creators encourage the use of the stories in learning settings, because the sample recordings include the names, ages, and locations of many of the speakers, they will not be shared to protect their privacy. Additionally, pseudonyms will be used for the participants in the Focus groups, per the University of Pennsylvania’s IRB consent agreement. Finally, the focus group participants’ quotes are lightly edited to aid with legibility and comprehension.

What It Means to Remember COVID-19

Findings suggest that engaging with the oral recordings from the digital archive helped participants process their own pandemic experiences and reflect on the politicization of the pandemic. The content of the recordings also triggered new epiphanies among participants, helping them recalibrate their relationship to illness, loss, and memory. However, the personal dimensions of the digital archive at times fostered and at other times challenged participants’ ability to connect to the stories and digital content, leading to competing opinions about the utility of digital archives.

The Soundscape of a Digital Pandemic Archive

Some participants celebrated the fact that the stories immersed them in the atmosphere of the speaker and captured the most pervasive emotions of the crisis: fear, loneliness, and fatigue for example. However, stories that were perceived as “rehearsed” felt disingenuous and appeared to detract from the emotional resonance. Some like Lisa found the uploaded recordings less overwhelming than the news ecosystem of the pandemic: “I think because we all experience[d] all the visual over simulation [with] everything we saw on TV and the news during that time, [listening] is almost like putting a soundtrack to [that].” (Lisa, 31, Woman).

Other participants worried about the biases people could hold based on the voices of the archive, as a person’s manner of speaking could lead to postulations about their socioeconomic class, race, and other identity markers. As another participant put it:

I think the audios help with hearing or picturing [the pandemic] realistically. Although I think it could also add some bias, because you can definitely imagine certain aspects of the voice that it belongs to and that will shape how you view the description of [the stories] (Jessica, 21, Woman).

This points to a critical tension. On one hand Jessica craved an immersive listening experience that captured the pandemic “realistically.” On the other hand, capturing a story in an authentic way led to questions about what was appropriate to assume about the bodies and voices behind the technology.

Yet another participant, Christina, saw the listening experience as an opportunity to revisit the soundscape of COVID-19. Engaging with the stories transported her back to the moment in time when physically being in community with people was not an option:

Hearing people’s individual stories was also kind of a callback to COVID because you couldn’t be with people […] I was lucky enough to still have work, but it was mostly on Zoom. And I was so video called out by the end of the day that I would just be like “no more camera.” I just remember so many NPR radio stories were like: “here I am recording [from] inside my closet” […] And I’m just thinking about these people, isolated in their houses, sending these little audio postcards into the world. That was kind of what we were all doing—or that’s what I was doing. So [listening] was like an unexpected emotional kind of ping [that] I just wasn’t anticipating (Christina, 37, Woman).

“I Feel like I was Living in My Past Memories”: Confronting Painful Memories of COVID-19

Participants at times struggled, and at other times appreciated the memories that recorded stories provoked. According to Christina, listening to the stories brought back some of the visceral feelings and uncertainty of the pandemic:

It was very relatable, but it was [also] surprising how many small details I’ve put to the back of my mind [because] it’s not our daily reality anymore to move around each other like that. And so it made me remember a lot of the physical parts of the pandemic […] and the acute part when we didn’t know anything too” (Christina, 37, Woman).

Listening to the stories also allowed the participants to reflect on the differences between the collected stories and their experiences. One formally incarcerated man, for example, spotlighted the privilege of being able to sit at home and record an audio story, a stark contrast from how he experienced the pandemic:

My experience was totally different than most people's experience [during] the pandemic […]. See, my situation is hard because I [didn’t have] free will during [the] pandemic. So [listening] made me think about what a lot of you […] people went through out here, but then it made me think about what we went through in [prison]. It was totally tougher and totally different (Ernie, n.a, Man).

Another woman reflected on the ambivalent feelings she had about being unable to mourn her mother’s death in the way she would have liked because of the pandemic:

[There were] a lot of mixed emotions due to the fact that we didn’t have a normal funeral, memorial […] due to the pandemic. She didn’t pass away from the pandemic; she was already sick, [and] part of me was happy that she didn't have to suffer anymore. You know, people that normally would have attended the funeral couldn’t. Me and my brothers did the best we could. [A] lot of mixed emotions there (Grace, 60, Woman).

Other participants struggled with the listening experience, feeling overwhelmed by both the content of the recordings and how they triggered a confrontation with their own individual painful COVID-19 experiences:

I did not recognize that listening to these things would not just take me back. But [would also] requires this level of emotional labor that I didn’t plan for. Like there’s a level of, you now, just being here and giving our time. And so I was just like—wow—not only doing the emotional processing in the present, but then also remembering back in time in 2020, [and] doing the emotional processing back then (Sandra, 37, Woman).

This moment with Sandra captured some of the emotional risks of engaging with crisis archives like Corona Diaries. Nevertheless, it led to an insightful moment, between Sandra and me, in which we openly discussed how future iterations of similar research projects could integrate mindfulness strategies into the listening experience to reduce the burden of remembering.

Which Stories Matter? Digital Archives and the Politics of Selection

Some participants openly wondered why the selected stories were not more political given the protests against police brutality and the rise in violence against Asian Americans during the pandemic. For one participant, a politically involved member of his community, this absence impacted how he engaged with the selected stories:

[When] they were saying, “no one was allowed out except to go to the store.” Like who are we talking about? Because I’m assuming that the stores were not stacking themselves, right? No. So that wasn’t necessarily true. […] One thing that I also noticed [was] that I didn’t hear from any of the 10 people, which I kind of remember as a big part of the first months of the first summer of [the] pandemic, [anything about] George Floyd and the protest that happened. And I’m just kind of curious, does anyone talk about that? Because that was something I experienced all digitally […] I was not there to protest along with other people, but it’s something that I experienced through social media (Sebastian, 47, Man).

This was an important moment for me as a researcher because it revealed that my selection process may not have fully met the expectations of the participants, who wanted more nuanced stories that addressed how the world was reacting to the public crisis of racism in spite of COVID-19. While it was unfeasible to listen to and discuss every oral story in the archive, some of which did address the policy and racial issues of the time, this moment of critique was useful for thinking about the politics and pitfalls of any selection process or curation endeavor.

Nevertheless, despite this critique of the sample, participants still demonstrated a curiosity about peoples’ experiences and an openness to discover why the contributors to the archive may have experienced the pandemic in different ways. As one woman put it:

I think the last person was the only one that really talked about the government response which I thought was really interesting and kind of contrasted how I experienced a lot of the first year of the pandemic. It made me curious about what people’s experiences of recording these were and what kind of compelled them to make recording about specific issues, feelings or things they experienced (Melissa, 37, Woman).

Another participant, Debora, (32, Woman) shed a different light on this issue by suggesting that the through line within the oral stories, despite how different they were, was the uncertainty of the moment.

Memory, Grief, and the Afterlife of the Pandemic

Focus group participants also reflected on how their lives continued to be impacted by the pandemic. This led to different insights about memory and the afterlives of the pandemic. One college student, for example, reflected on time’s passage during the pandemic, alluding to its disorienting effect:

It felt like we entered a wormhole when the pandemic began and then all of a sudden it was two, three years later and everything was monumentally different […] It’s just interesting to think about how the pandemic kind of irreplicably (sic) changed—not just us—but the political landscape (Joshua, 20, Man).

Processing the pandemic in the present, within a small group, was also a vocalized reason why some people decided to participate in the focus group. Though some participants mused about the impulse to leave the pandemic behind, they also simultaneously shared an interest in bridging past experiences with present ones. A few participants even saw their participation as a way of resisting public accounts about the “end of the pandemic.” In the words of Melissa:

I share similar feelings to some other folks about how [the] pandemic isn’t actually over. I still am very careful, mask everywhere, and test often […] One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is the unprocessed grief of the last three, four years of the pandemic and how that has metabolized—or not—in different ways in our culture and society (Melissa, 37, Woman).

Finally, some saw their participation in the study as a way of contributing to ongoing public facing discussions about the pandemic beyond 2020. A participant named Sandra, for example, viewed her involvement as a way of revitalizing the memory of the pandemic:

I wanted to participate in this study because the pandemic affected me very deeply, not just in terms of my own personal life, but also in terms of how I see our society, [and] in terms of our pandemic response. I feel like people—[and] society at large—we’re forgetting the pandemic. […] So I wanted to be part of this [and] a part of not forgetting (Sandra, 37, Woman).

This awareness that the memory of the pandemic is in danger of being sidelined influenced how participants like Sandra engaged with the recordings. As Sandra and others suggested, their participation equated to active remembrance, a way of aiding memory work and demonstrating that the pandemic’s impact continues to be felt individually and within their communities.

The Utility of Digital Pandemic Archives in Post-Pandemic Times

Focus group participants also touched on the role digital archives should play in mediating global crises. Some participants felt that personalized audio content could offer an engaging way of framing the crisis. As Joshua explained:

I always think that qualitative sources of research are [as] important in prestige as quantitative. Like we can know covid infection statistics, covid death statistics, etcetera, but as we go further and further on with more time put in between [now] and when the pandemic started, it will be super important see these more tactile audio-visual media that really speak to what people’s experiences were like during that early stage of transformation (Joshua, 20, Man).

Another participant, Lisa, suggested that digital pandemic media may help educate people about the crisis because it is more accessible—especially for those that may have been put off by or lack access to historical documents. Nevertheless, Lisa also grasped the limitations of relying on digital memory, stopping short of equating accessibility to equitability, especially without clear criteria for how the stories from archives like Corona Diaries would be selected:

I think the positive about using audio archives is that it makes it more real. I've kind of always had a dislike for history. You see these black and white pictures, you read these [historical] stories, and everything feels so distant. But when you hear a voice it just makes it seem real […] I feel more connected to it. I don't know what the use could look like, because I know […] each person's viewpoint is different. And so I don't know. Like which stories do you choose to highlight? How many [stories] is too many? How many is not enough? [I’m] not sure (Lisa, 31, Woman).

Nevertheless, there was a general awareness that the pandemic, unlike other global crises that unevenly touched global populations, was unique because of how it impacted the entire world to varying degrees. Participants suggested that revisiting digital pandemic archives years from now could heighten the awareness of what a historically transformative period it was for those who lived through it.

Discussion

This article illustrated how different people negotiated between the personal and the collective toll of the pandemic as they listened to and discussed a collection of oral stories from the digital archive, Corona Diaries. Part of the motivation of this article stems from the insistence that rigorous work on the pandemic and future crises must seek to mediate between the communal and the individual. The macro-level spectacularized shutdowns of schools, neighborhoods, and whole countries were some of the ways the world learned to internalize the pandemic early on. While these measures, and the media’s reporting of these measures were important for galvanizing governments into action (action that included making and distributing masks and PPE gear and developing a vaccine), they sometimes masked the individual stories that made up the crisis. Promoting these personalized stories can contribute to a more holistic understanding and appreciation for the toll of the pandemic.

This article also demonstrates how, in centering listening and dialogue (see: Orgad et al., 2025), COVID-19 archives more generally can be used in classroom settings, libraries, museums, and future public memorials to facilitate ongoing collective reckonings with the individual lives and experiences lost during the pandemic. Local, national, and global efforts to create a premediated infrastructure for pandemic experiences (see Erll, 2009, 2017, 2020), both digital and non-digital, that in essence preserves and facilitates the spread of these experiences are some of the most important collective tools we have. This infrastructure, of course, would include the use of archives like Corona diaries in public memory institutions to help us anticipate future disasters. This may in turn help raise support for policies that can help us withstand other crises of similar or greater proportions. Memory infrastructures are paramount for preserving the memory of the pandemic; In fact they could be the deciding factor between what distinguishes a hazard, a natural occurrence, from a disaster, which occurs when “hazards [like] floods, earthquakes and viruses meet risk, vulnerability and exposure” (Raju et al., 2024, para 5).

In showcasing how digital archives—and in this case oral digital archives that preserve personal memories and stories of COVID-19—can facilitate creative memory practices, I suggest that the role of digital pandemic archives in post-pandemic times can move us away from thinking about archives as “institutions” of memory and towards an understanding of archives as “tools” for memory (Appadurai, 2003), particularly when we engage with them as relational, discursive, and dialogical instruments. I also demonstrate that crisis moments can be conjunctural (Hall, 2013) opportunities for researchers to work with critical, collaborative, and creative methods for understanding the individual and collective experiences of a given crisis beyond its unfolding.

Thus, the ethos of this article is similar to what Yang and Moses (2023) refer to as “a public culture of pandemic storytelling,” which they describe as a way of embracing the merits of accessibility, “visibility and audibility” in academic research about the COVID-19 pandemic and the people it impacted (p. 17). Although not everyone experienced the COVID-19 pandemic in the same way, most people had to acclimate to rapidly changing rules about lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine availability, and residual economic effects such as inflation. These uncertainties, to varying degrees, impacted the lives of everyone during the pandemic. Thus, personal narratives about the pandemic, preserved within widely accessible, global, crowdsourced digital archives such as Corona Diaries, provide the potential for spatially dispersed communities to connect their local experiences with global ones. Of course, embracing the potential of these pandemic archives does not mean that these crowdsourced collections are perfect; therefore, it falls on us as researchers to make ethical choices about the stories we choose to elevate (see Zumthurm & Krebs, 2022) and the experimental methods we use to evoke their impact. The use of focus groups, for example, is just one way researchers may choose to explore the role digital archives can play in ongoing COVID-19 memory work for institutions, communities, and individuals.

Finally, it is not enough for digital tools to simply supplement memory environments; rather, digital technologies must also “make possible different kinds of articulations of social memory” (Reading, 2003, p. 68) that offer more agency to people. This agency, consequently, can help individuals form novel ideas and connections with traumatic historical events, based on their unique backgrounds, location, and identities (Reading et al., 2021). Building on these arguments further, my analysis of the focus group data reveals how digital technologies can be used to re-integrate memories of global crises, like COVID-19, into our individual, local, and social experiences so that they hold more meaning for individuals from diverse global communities. As memory culture becomes increasingly digitized and globalized, meaningful ways of concretizing local groups’ connections to traumatic disasters and crises must be prioritized within commemoration practices, even when they may oppose the more purist vision of history that directly contradicts the presentist demands of new media (Hoskins, 2003, p. 15).

Conclusion

This article adds to a growing body of research that investigates how COVID-19 is shaping commemorative practices in global contexts (Mazzucchelli & Panico, 2021; Roigé et al., 2024); moreover, it exists alongside other advocacy scholarship pushing against institutional forgetting and instead for the integration of relevant policy lessons from the pandemic into the public sphere (Goggins, 2023). Lastly, while calls to document pandemic stories ensured that we would have a digital “memory boom” of pandemic stories, these crowdsourced collections are not always inclusive or representative of diverse voices (Zumthurm & Krebs, 2022). That is why researchers must strive to be reflective and intentional about the experiences we choose to elevate in institutional settings. As Hoskins and Halstead (2021) note, how we choose to make these memories accessible, useful, and meaningful remains the task ahead. Emphasizing the policy stakes of this article is crucial, as it will provide future researchers with insight into which features of pandemic stories and experiences may resonate with audiences in memory environments. This can then inform our understanding of how digital technologies can help manage, mediate, and preserve our memories of COVID-19 moving forward.