Breathe new life into pandemic data, one story at a time
Atlas Stories, the new oral history initiative from the US Covid Atlas, integrates lived experiences with 2+ years of pandemic data.
In a world saturated with COVID-19 data, now you can share your story.
We are thrilled to launch Atlas Stories, the newest initiative from the US Covid Atlas. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted inequitable impacts on diverse people and places, alongside community capacity for resilience. We know that those stories don’t always get told in the numbers.
Atlas Stories collects the stories behind the statistics. We seek perspectives that represent the diversity of pandemic experiences in the United States, in order to build a more holistic archive.
Share your story
The pandemic has impacted everyone’s life. And everyone has a story to tell about their pandemic experience. By participating in this oral histories project — whether by sharing a video or audio story, written memory, photo or image, or calling in your story via phone — you are lifting up the stories behind the data and humanizing the statistics of the pandemic.
Watch for more detail.
More than just data
Your story can be a part of the US Covid Atlas archive, adding critical context to the data. Stories will be tagged geographically to your county, so shared experiences of your community can be explored together.
Choose your story type
We support four different ways to tell your story through our web portal or over the phone. You’re invited to share up to three different stories about your experiences of COVID-19 in the United States.
You control your story
By sharing your story with us, you keep all the rights to use your story in any way you want. Our license allows us to publish your story, but you can choose to remove it at any time. In your account, you can preview and manage your submitted stories, opt in to future research opportunities, and share more stories.
Submissions can be completely anonymous. The only information that we require for you to share along with your story submission is email address to create your account and your county of residence (or county most relevant to your pandemic experience) in the United States. This allows us to geo-tag your story in a random location in that county, to match with other county-level data currently featured on the Atlas. You’re not required to share your name or other personal information.
Different lived experiences → different data experiences
We know that people have different relationships with data, whether through recent experiences or shared community histories. To that end, we aim to incorporate accessibility across technologies, languages, and media to make Atlas Stories as transparent and reflective of diverse experiences as possible. Stories are welcome in all languages. The Stories site can be translated into dozens of languages through the complete Google Translate library (click the ‘translate’ icon on the top right corner of your screen). All video and audio stories have captions, which can be turned on and off. Our phone line is available to call in free of charge to those who would prefer to share their story over the phone, with audio prompts in both English and Spanish.
Breathe new life into the data
We are proud to elevate pandemic experiences through pairing stories and data and contributing to a more complete view of the impact of the pandemic. Check out the stories already submitted on the Atlas Stories layer on the US Covid Atlas, and share your story.
