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The Ottawa Citizen’s annual journalistic tribute to Canada’s war dead will conclude this year with its 14th profile of a randomly selected soldier on Remembrance Day.
The project, known as We Are The Dead, began in 2011, the brainchild of former Citizen reporter Glen McGregor.
A data journalism specialist, McGregor had obtained a copy of a Veterans Affairs Canada database, which listed all 119,531 of the servicemen and women who had died in uniform. He wrote code for a Twitter account (now X), and had it issue a name from the database randomly once every hour.
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For the past 13 years, the online memorial has published 24 names a day, one at 11 minutes past each hour. The internet bot is expected to complete its publication of the full list of war dead early next year, which makes this the final year of the We Are The Dead series.
After launching the site in October 2011, McGregor decided to write a one-day profile of the soldier whose name was published on the account at 11:11 a.m. on Remembrance Day. It was “a journalistic leap of faith,” he said, since he had no idea whether such a thing was possible.
It was, and for the past 13 years, this newspaper has told the life story of a randomly selected Canadian soldier on Nov. 11.
The project gathered momentum each year as more resources became available online and more people joined in the crowdsourcing of information. Members of the public have proved particularly adept at genealogy, which is critical to the task of tracing a soldier’s living relatives, and recovering family recollections and pictures.
The name of this year’s final, featured soldier will be published Monday at 11:11 a.m. on the X account @WeAreTheDead.
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