This is a visualization of the process behind @nyt_first_said. Each day, a script scrapes new articles from nytimes.com. That text is tokenized, or split into words based on whitespace and punctuation. Each word then must pass several criteria. Containing a number or special character is criteria for disqualification. To avoid proper nouns, all capitalized words are filtered. The most important check is against the New York Time's archive search service. The archive goes back to 1851 and contains more than 13 million articles. The paper publishes many thousands of words each day, but only a very few are firsts.

This website is designed as a social mirror to show the prevalence of casual homophobia in our society. Words and phrases like “faggot,” “dyke,” “no homo,” and “so gay” are used casually in everyday language, despite promoting the continued alienation, isolation and — in some tragic cases — suicide of sexual and gender minority (LGBTQ) youth.