Ancient Web: A COVID Signage Archive Saved the Temporary Rules on Our Walls

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

For a while, every doorway seemed to have a fresh sheet of paper explaining how to enter. Most of those signs were never intended to survive the emergency that produced them.

Explore the COVID-19 Signage Archive.

Eli Fessler's public collection preserves more than 4,500 submitted photographs of pandemic-related signs. The homepage displays examples from Honolulu, Seattle, Boston, and other cities and invites visitors to explore material collected on six continents. Browse by location, date, words on the sign, or descriptive tags such as 'floor marker,' 'hand-written,' 'governmental,' and 'typos.'

The search is built around the actual language of the signs. It can find phrases like 'social distancing,' '6 feet,' and 'vaccinated,' along with a particular month or day. An archive that preserved only photographs would be useful; an archive of their transcribed instructions can also be studied as text.

How an ordinary instruction becomes evidence

The submission form asks for the photograph's location, date, photographer, transcription, and tags. Contributors agree to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, and uploaded images have their EXIF metadata removed. The archive explains that text transcription helps accessibility and can support later language analysis.

The material is more varied than official posters. It welcomes shop-window announcements, informal stickers, murals, billboards, and painted floor markers. One Pittsburgh example from June 25, 2021 is a handwritten masks-required notice. A Singapore example from December 2020 records detailed instructions for QR-code contact-tracing check-ins.

Those records make it possible to compare the physical and linguistic styles of restrictions across different places. A piece of tape on a shop floor and a professionally printed municipal instruction were both part of public life.

This is not a surviving 1990s website. Its value as a later preservation exception is precisely that it set out to document something recent before it disappeared. The site's photograph count can continue to change, so it should not be treated as a frozen total.

Browse the sign collection or read how contributions are documented.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.