Most datasets record what people say. This one records why it mattered to them, in their own words.
Free for everyone. Owned by no one.
Every story shared as trainable, publicly or anonymously, is open to anyone: researchers, students, nonprofits and AI companies alike. No fees, no paywall, no profit motive.
Each story pairs what happened with what it meant: the original text, the writer’s own reflection on its meaning, what they wish AI understood, what they felt, and optional age range, decade and country. Names and phone numbers are hidden, and withdrawn stories leave every future version. Until the first quarterly release, downloads are a live preview.
License: CC BY 4.0 · Please credit the Humanity ArchiveThe fields
- story
- The moment, in the writer’s own words and language. Names and phone numbers are hidden as [name] and [phone] unless the writer chose to keep them.
- meaning
- The writer’s answer to “What did this moment mean to you?”
- ai_understanding
- Their answer to “What do you wish an AI understood about it?”
- reflection_helped, reflection_now
- For heavy topics: what helped them through it, and what they understand now.
- feelings, theme, age_range, decade, country, language
- Optional context, never linked to a person.
- content_note, is_heavy
- Set when the story touches on grief, illness, violence or something else heavy.
- consent_level
- public_trainable (also shown in the Archive) or anonymous_trainable (dataset only).
- verification
reviewed_by_human: A person read the story in our review queue and approved it against the story guidelines before it was published.not_reviewed: The story was published without a person reading it first. Readers can still report it, and reported stories are taken down until a person reviews them. Stories that are heavy or reported by readers are never published, or exported, until a person approves them. This label tells you whether a person reviewed the story. It doesn’t prove who wrote it.- witness_count, published_year
- How many readers said “I’ve felt this too”, and the year it was published.
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Every story is written by a person, about their own life. We review stories and remove ones that break that promise.