In this article, we discuss some of the ways people’s orientations towards Edinburgh changed during the first COVID-19 lockdown, by focusing only on those who lived alone at the time. Some international students, for example, felt more at home across wider areas of Edinburgh that they explored on walks, while some locals felt a loss of community when they were unable to access their usual gathering places. The retired participants in our research demonstrate a particular enthusiasm for moving their previous social events to online spaces.

Open Access: Imagining the city in lockdown: Place in the COVID-19 self-recordings of the Lothian Diary Project 
Claire Cowie, Lauren Hall-Lew, Zuzana Elliott, Anita Klingler, Nina Markl, and Stephen Joseph McNulty. 2022. Imagining the city in lockdown: Place in the COVID-19 self-recordings of the Lothian Diary Project. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence: Language & Computation.

Video: Using Mass Observation’s Covid-19 Collections: Other journals of the plague year (2:00-30:05) 

We are social scientists who wanted to document and understand the effects of COVID-19 on society. At the same time, we were all living through those effects, seeing those effects on everyone around us. How could we best support each other, our local communities, and those participating in our research?

We applied for grants and waited until we could pay participants the equivalent of a living wage per hour that they contributed. We offered vouchers for local businesses in lieu of payment, to support those businesses and to allow participants without bank accounts to be compensated.

We also offered donations to local charities in lieu of payment, each supporting one of our 11 charity partners who then helped us get the word out. We did this to ensures that the perspectives and voices who are hit hardest by the pandemic were included, so their voices would get into research and policy reports. We held public engagement events online and later in person, to get those voices heard, to connect participants to one another, and to give space for a community to grieve, reflect, and learn.

In this article, we discuss how we collected the Lothian Diaries and why they’re particularly useful for research in sociolinguistics, the study of language and society.

Open Access: The Lothian Diary Project: sociolinguistic methods during the COVID-19 lockdown
Lauren Hall-Lew, Claire Cowie, Catherine Lai, Nina Markl, Stephen Joseph McNulty, Shan-Jan Sarah Liu, Clare Llewellyn, Beatrice Alex, Zuzana Elliott, and Anita Klingler. 2022. The Lothian Diary Project: Sociolinguistic Methods during the COVID-19 Lockdown. Linguistics Vanguard.

Several of the team members are sociolinguists: researchers who study the relationship between language and society. Previous research on Edinburgh and the Lothians has drawn on face-to-face interviews and has been limited to only white, Scottish, housed, non-disabled adults born and raised in the area.

In the Lothian Diary Project, we heard from anyone who lived here: any background, any level of mobility, any age. Our future work plans to make use of this treasure trove to redefine concepts of the Edinburgh "speech community."

But to start off, we need to compare our work to the work that's come before us. Here, we analysed the speech of eight white Scottish men born and raised in Edinburgh and the Lothians. They were then compared to recordings of similar speakers collected by John Esling in the 1970s (analysed by Jess Göbel). We focused on how speakers pronounced the vowel in words like kit or lip, because other work has shown that working class speakers and middle class speakers in Scotland pronounce this vowel differently from one another. Our data show a rather surprising finding, one that we think is because the study of a lockdown diary is more serious and formal than the style of the 1970s interviews. It's just a hypothesis, so watch this space!

Open Access: Variation in the Scottish BIT vowel: Comparing two corpora
Hall-Lew, Lauren, Zuzana Elliott, Jessica Göbel, Claire Cowie, and Nina Markl. 2023. Variation in the Scottish BIT vowel: Comparing two corpora. Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2023. (ID: 740.)

Video: Stable variation & the formality of pandemic discourse: The Scottish BIT vowel

A subset of the Lothian Diaries dataset is available to access for other researchers. You can read our short peer-reviewed description of that dataset here.

Open Access: The Lothian Diary Project: Investigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Edinburgh and Lothian Residents
Hall-Lew, Lauren, Claire Cowie, Stephen Joseph McNulty, Nina Markl, Catherine Lai, Clare Llewellyn, Beatrice Alex, Nini Fang, Zuzana Elliott, and Anita Klinger. 2021. The Lothian Diary Project: Investigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Edinburgh and Lothian Residents. Journal of Open Humanities Data 7(4):1–5.

Our project is sort of like an oral history project, but sort of not! In this paper, geared toward an audience of historians, we discuss the similarities and differences. We also talk about how the nature of the recordings changed as history unfolded, from the first to second lockdown into the summer of 2021 when vaccinations started. We also discuss plans to rerecord participants in the future.

Open Access: Covid-19 Oral Histories - blog
Anita Klingler and Lauren Hall-Lew. 2023. Covid-19 Oral Histories. Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History Blog.

Some of our team members are language technologists, specializing in human-computer interaction. For example, research on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) works to improve how well our phones and computers understand and transcribe our speech. ASR is famously better for some voices than others, and the range of voices in the Lothian Diary Project dataset is useful for showing how this is the case.

This paper looks at 13 of the diaries that differ by the contributor's accent, and the authors find big differences between accent types but also between speakers of the same accent. This leads the authors to make some broader suggestions for how to improve ASR.

Open Access: Context-sensitive evaluation of automatic speech recognition: considering user experience & language variation
Markl, Nina & Catherine Lai. 2021. Context-sensitive evaluation of automatic speech recognition: Considering user experience & language variation. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Bridging Human–Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing, 34–40. Association for Computational Linguistics.