COVID-19: Help us tell the stories of those we’ve lost | Health and Fitness
More than 390 Nebraskans have died of COVID-19, but beyond basic demographics, the public doesn’t know who they were — their work, their passions, how they will be remembered.
A crowdsourcing effort launched recently by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Journalism and Mass Communication aims to put stories to the statistics.
“These people are mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, friends, neighbors, members of our community. And we know so little about them,” student journalist Will Bauer wrote in introducing the project. “In any other time, we would have memorials to the dead. What we’re attempting to do is to fix that. We want to help Nebraska remember those lost to COVID-19. And we need your help.”
The college’s Roper Lab has created a form enabling friends and loved ones to voluntarily share the names and other information of victims of the coronavirus. The students, under faculty guidance, will correlate information from the forms with publicly available material, including obituaries and news reports.
The effort is entirely voluntary and the student journalists will work to verify what’s submitted. The students and other journalists will look for stories in the data. To participate, visit: roperdatalab.github.io.
