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I'm the lead researcher on a project we just launched at @teamtrace called #SinceParkland, where student journalists across the U.S. wrote profiles of their peers who died by gun since the Stoneman Douglas shooting.
Compiling the data was painstaking. sinceparkland.org
Compiling the data was painstaking. sinceparkland.org
Every day for 8 months I consulted @GunDeaths and searched for people 18 and younger who were fatally shot. We used 18 as the cutoff age because Meadow Pollack, who died in Parkland, was 18. gunviolencearchive.org 
I amassed the shootings in an Excel spreadsheet. To date, it's up to 1,222 rows — and climbing, because we're still compiling victims until the 1-year anniversary of the Parkland massacre, which is Thursday.
After the victims were identified and our student journalists wrote 100-word portraits of them, we compiled them in Airtable. Then I exported the names into a Google doc so @teamtrace could tweet them out — all of them.
It will probably take hours to deploy.
It will probably take hours to deploy.
This Google doc of victims' names has grown to 26 pages.
As our launch date drew closer, I went through it several times to make sure each victim that was added to Airtable also made it onto my list, and every name was spelled correctly.
Each pass took me 12 HOURS.
As our launch date drew closer, I went through it several times to make sure each victim that was added to Airtable also made it onto my list, and every name was spelled correctly.
Each pass took me 12 HOURS.
Local news organizations are stretched thin and can't always get names exactly right, so I had to go through online obits.
So many kids in the U.S. are dying from gun violence that it takes half a day just to go through a list of their names to make sure they're spelled right.
So many kids in the U.S. are dying from gun violence that it takes half a day just to go through a list of their names to make sure they're spelled right.
And our profiles of child gun violence victims aren't even complete — we're going to keep going until Feb. 13 at 11:59 p.m.
Which means the final profiles that will close the project haven't even been written yet — because those kids are still alive. 💔
Which means the final profiles that will close the project haven't even been written yet — because those kids are still alive. 💔
I just deployed a tweetstorm of kids killed by guns #SinceParkland for @teamtrace. The names spanned 101 tweets. It took 39 minutes to roll them out.
The list of victims starts here:
The list of victims starts here:
