Digital newsrooms at the Ottawa Citizen and OpenFile decided to use technology to help connect their readers to our war-torn past this Remembrance Day.

@Wearethedead is a bot created by Ottawa Citizen data journalist Glen McGregor that tweets one fallen Canadian soldier on the 11th minute of every hour. Excluding any updates from today onward, it will take 13 years to tweet the entire database. 

You can read more about how McGregor came up with the idea in the Ottawa Citizen blog post here. 

Each tweet includes the name, position, date and location of death, and age of the soldier who died. 

OpenFile’s Poppy File  is a data-driven historical retrospective on Canadian veterans that has blossomed from a simple map only a year ago into a beautiful, popular interactive series that allows viewers to discover the identities of soldiers killed in war who once lived in their neighbourhoods, in addition to touching personal narratives and summary charts.

Lovely to see newsmedia using technology creatively to help us connect to an increasingly distant past. 

-Momoko Price