About Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

The pandemic has changed us. We’re processing new feelings together every day. We’ve watched data give shape to the invisible virus — where it is, who it affects, how it moves. But that data ignores human emotions. This is an experiment to trace the emotional waves of the pandemic. The ways we grieve, find solace, and move forward.

Watching the pandemic through an epidemiologist’s lens and learning concepts like “social distancing” and “herd immunity” keeps us safe. But it overlooks our humanity. It’s more important than ever to remember and celebrate that we’re human. Human feelings, to us, are the defining data of this pandemic.

This project is about hardship, hope, and the collective experience. Things that have changed, things that haven’t, and things that may still. This is an unprecedented challenge, but we are resilient — yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

To honor the human story behind COVID-19, we used Twitter to trace the social impact of the pandemic. We started by isolating the hundreds of thousands of Tweets per month that dealt with COVID. Then we sorted those into 10 topics, which give structure to our story. Finally, we used Artificial Intelligence and IBM Watson’s Tone Analyzer to map our Tweets to four unique sentiments: fear, joy, sadness, and confidence, giving you another way to process the data.

Exploring our circular timeline will reveal how major events have shaped the conversation, how our shared humanity creates patterns, and how feelings have evolved (and continue to evolve) as the situation and our understanding of it have changed. When you’re finished exploring, you’re invited to use the hashtag #NFBTomorrow to add your own wishes, sentiments, and stories to the collective chronicle.