Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow is a data visualization experiment to trace the emotional waves of the pandemic. Most of the Covid data that we are used to seeing hasn’t taken into account the emotional impact of the pandemic. National Film Board of Canada and Jam3 have put together this interactive visual that lets you explore over 600k tweets (organized by an AI) into the feelings of fear, joy, sadness, and confidence.

This is an experiment to make the emotional impact of the pandemic visible. Explore hundreds of thousands of Tweets, organized by sentiment. Follow the curves, layers, and patterns of our collective feelings. What you’ll see is a story of resilience. People making sense, finding solace, and moving forward.

Watching the pandemic through an epidemiologist’s lens and learning concepts like “social distancing” and “herd immunity” keeps us safe. But it ignores 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.

To honour that human story, we used Twitter to trace the social narrative of the pandemic. Analyzing over 70k tweets per month, we used IBM Watson’s AI to map four unique sentiments: fear, joy, sadness, and confidence.

You can explore our circular timeline to see how major events have shaped the conversation, how our shared humanity has expressed itself in common topics, and how feelings have evolved (and continue to evolve) over time. As the outbreak continues, we’ll keep collecting memories and predictions, and mapping the colour and shape of our experience.

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.

Explore the interactive graphic Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (nfb.ca), and read more About | Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow | NFB.