UT gathering electronic time capsules about 2020
Reflecting on the intense year that has been 2020, historian Daina Ramey Berry wanted to create a way for the members of the University of Texas at Austin community to process, share and document their experiences for people to look at for years to come.
“A lot of people were coming to us and saying, ‘How do we make sense of this? The racial climate? The election year? All of these are moments historians write about,” said Berry, a history professor at UT.
“I thought, ‘How can we come together, survive and teach about (2020) while we’re living through it?’”
In October, Berry quietly launched “Beyond 2020 Living History,” a collaborative public history project that collects digital time capsules from UT students, staff and faculty to provide a safe space to share their experiences during 2020 and the pandemic.
Berry and members of the UT’s history department, including Adam Clulow, an associate professor of history, put together a website in six weeks, circulating it around the university to document the “global, social, political, environmental, and personal fault lines of 2020.”
They used the capsules as a class assignment for students, asking them to submit four photos with captions that range from 60 to 80 words.
What ensued were a curated collection of submissions from members of the UT community from all over the world, showing what they were doing, feeling and cooking as the pandemic raged on and instances of social injustices made headlines.
Photos of masks, makeshift work-from-home setups, snapshots of homeschooling, half-empty stadiums, hazy skies created by wildfires, newly adopted pets and elaborate home-cooked meals in lieu of in-dining at restaurants were posted.
Bare classrooms, election results, polling lines, Black Lives Matter signs, nostalgic photos of family members people hadn’t seen in months and screenshots of Zoom meetings and news articles chronicled the year of the pandemic.
“Friends and family are everything to me,” one person wrote under a photo of a dinner table. “I cannot wait to be back around the dinner table with the people I love, laughing.”
Berry submitted photos of herself masked with her mother, her worn-out walking shoes, a Black Lives Matter bus, and a gym that she and her family set up in her garage.
“We knew after the death of Ahmaud Arbery that going on a run could be life threatening,” she wrote of the February slaying of the Georgia man. “So we cobbled together used equipment; borrowed a spin bike from a friend, built a balance beam, and purchased items from gyms and online vendors. By mid-summer, we began working out with our neighbors and created a series of fitness challenges. Exercise became the highlight of our day and we did it to affirm life in the face of so much death.”
Clulow said the year has been so much to process.
“And you’re processing it all in isolation. This project talks about how difficult it is to go through 2020, particularly for students who are stuck in small spaces,” he said.
The time capsules, in particular, have provided a straightforward way for people to interpret or show a snapshot of their lives in an accessible way, said Berry, noting that most students have access to a phone or can compile photos and captions describing memories regardless of age, background or education level.
“It adds richness and allows people to see that you don’t have to be in history to contribute,” Berry said.
Clulow said: “It’s also intimate at the same time. We see these aspects of each other’s lives. We’re all going through the same thing but in a different way.”
Since October, submissions have come in daily, with 25 on the website, and more expected.
The project’s website went public Friday, welcoming more capsules from the UT community at large.
“We don’t have the capacity to take in capsules from all over the world,” Berry said.
But UT historians envision the project will serve as an example for other institutions and how they can document their respective community experiences. A “eaching” tab on the Beyond 2020 website provides some guidance on how other institutions can begin collecting these memories.
“If someone doesn’t collect them,” Clulow added. “It’s going to be lost.”
Berry and Clulow said the department is planning a social media campaign with hashtags.
Faculty members also are looking to analyze which 20 images, objects or experiences encapsulate the year, and Clulow said the capsules might fuel a book that will analyze how UT and the greater society are handling the pandemic.
“2020 is just a year that we’re going to be writing about for the next couple of decades. … So many events are happening at this moment,” Clulow said. “We want to bring these moments together.”