LANSING, Mich. — A team of researchers at Michigan State University has a growing collection of extremely personal stories about how the deadly shooting on their campus has impacted people of all walks of life.
Inside the Linguistics Department at MSU, Doctors Betsy Sneller and Suzanne Wagner have made a career of studying the way we talk.
One of the most critical points in any of our lives happened in 2020— a week after Dr. Sneller was hired.
The pandemic put a hiccup in many of their plans, but they knew it would have historical effects on our interactions with each other.
"Which is important for language, and language change and language development," Dr. Sneller, assistant professor of Linguistics, recalled to FOX 17. "If there's any way that we can document this, we got to get on it."
So they came up with Michigan COVID Diaries as a way for people to still have their voice heard but from a distance.
Diarists could orally record their lives, whatever it may have looked like at the time.
Dr. Sneller, who is the project lead, does have her self-described "nerdy" agenda about language and how it changes over time but says the project's meaning is two-fold.
"This is really valuable data because, even though it might seem boring, that's the kind of data that tells historians what everyday life was like and how everyday life changed," she said.
Three years later, the project now has 20 undergraduate and four graduate students behind it. It has transformed from people orally documenting their pandemic lives to their observations of daily life.
They now simply call it "Michigan Diaries."
"We ask them things like, 'tell us about a time when you got lost and you couldn't figure out how to go home again,'" explained Dr. Wagner, the co-lead on the project. "Or really sometimes quite silly questions like, you know, 'pineapple on pizza, yay or nay.'"
It's a chance for anyone in Michigan to record their authentic voice anonymously. The researchers only ask that you frame it as if you're talking to your best friend.
"So you can cry, you can swear you can, you know, whatever, hang out, talk into your phone and that's the authentic voices that we're hoping to hear," Dr. Sneller explained.
It's revealed fascinating changes in, for example, the way dialect changes along generational lines.
Inevitably, people create entries over the same topic. It leads to special collections like "Roe v. Wade" and the "Oxford High School Shooting."
It was no different the night of February 13, when a gunman killed three Michigan State students and hurt five more.
READ MORE: Memorials continue to grow at MSU following Monday's deadly shooting
Dr. Sneller said, "Really as soon as this event happened, as soon as I heard about it, I kind of had a sinking feeling of we're gonna have to do a special collection about this."
They named this one the "Spartan Strong Collection."
What Drs. Sneller and Wagner could not have predicted was how the community would respond to the project.
The encouraging messages poured in unsolicited. Diarists left words of support, in addition to those who expressed sadness, frustration and anger.
"There was something really extra amazing about hearing from people from up and down Michigan sending us those messages and experiences," Dr. Wagner said.
Dr. Sneller added, "I wasn't expecting this project to produce a community that would, in turn, support me as a researcher and my students as researchers, and that was something that was really, really powerful."
While they acknowledge their professional responsibility in collecting the data, it still helps them because they too are still hurting.
Dr. Wagner lives five minutes from Berkey Hall and has taught in the building where part of the shooting happened.
"What was so frightening for me, listening to the scanner, was all the different places around campus where the shooter might have been," she said, "and having a very clear picture in my head of what those locations were."
Dr. Sneller was at home with her newborn. "I was in the middle of putting this new life to sleep, and meanwhile, somebody came to my workplace to bring death. And this, you know, this is the closest personal experience that I've had with a mass shooting, and I was kind of surprised how much it impacted me immediately, just like breaking down into tears."
Through their project they've found healing and therapy.
Dr. Sneller said, "People will often end their very first diary entry with something like 'Oh, wow, that was really therapeutic.'"
They've also formed a bond with people around the country. Michigan Diaries is typically reserved for Michiganders, but they opened the Spartan Strong collection to people around the country because they saw how many others felt connected to the tragedy.
While there may be data to collect on how diarists address the tragedy and the change in the language used, researchers hope this collection and the series as a whole will help break the cycle of school shootings.
"I think one of the things that is devastating to me personally, is that we only have four special collections, and two of them are about a mass shooting," Dr. Sneller remarked. "It's my hope that the data that we're collecting can be part of a push for change, as part of that historical documentation."
Dr. Wagner said, "It would be nice to think that collective voice from people of different ages and different walks of life, explaining how awful it is, would have some resonance where it needs to be heard."
The pair of professors discussed the preservation of the audio and how showcasing them for the general public differs from journalism.
"We maintain trust with people by assuring them that we're always going to keep their identities confidential," Dr. Wagner said. "And I'm sure that's appealing for lots of people who want to think about this as a fairly private endeavor."
They also want to open the door to research collaborators and anyone who thinks a question of theirs may be answered by the data collected.
Dr. Sneller explains, "Because it's such a rich corpus, it means that the number of the types of research questions that people can ask about this data is really expansive."
If you're interested in joining the project as a diarist, you can learn more about the process here.
