COVID-19 Signage Archive

About Map Tags Upload
Hi! The COVID-19 Signage Archive aims to preserve and invite exploration of the worldwide, physical, pandemic-related messaging that has come into existence beginning in early 2020. The project seeks to archive these ephemera, and to help document the linguistic landscapes of shared concepts such as social/​physical distancing, mask-wearing, and hand washing – while simultaneously serving as an accessible dataset/​corpus available for linguistic and sociological analysis. It launched in December 2020.
The project and site was envisioned and built by eli fessler, a.k.a. @frozenpandaman on Twitter. For any questions, concerns, or comments, please email me! (I'm also a full-time student. Everything here was built entirely from scratch over the course of many months. Please consider stopping by my Ko-fi page to leave a tip + support the increasing cost of running the site, or check out my website for other projects! Thanks!)
All images on the site are designated free cultural works and are available under the permissive CC BY 4.0 license. Please reach out if you're using images or data provided by the project!
Searching
The search field, by default, searches by location, or by date if given a YYYY-MM or YYYY-MM-DD format. Searches are not case-sensitive. Various prefixes allow searching by other fields:
  • text:keep apart searches for signs which include the words "keep" and "apart" (in any order, including "keep 6ft apart")
  • text:"keep apart" searches for the exact phrase "keep apart" (excluding "keep 6ft apart")
  • tag:spanish searches for signs written in Spanish – see the tag list for more
  • in:CA searches for all photos from the state of California (also works with countries)
  • by:eli searches for photos by the (exact) author "eli"
At this time, multiple search prefixes cannot be used together.
Special thanks
  • @ForestsOfMars – For helping me realize it was possible to make this site using only Flask!
  • @mayhewsw & @yaelnetzer – For reaching out about some similar ideas & projects.
  • Everyone who took and sent their photos to me manually in the early stages of the project!
Feedback and suggestions are appreciated via Twitter or email!