Modern society is dynamic and changeable. The development trends of nowadays have accelerated the changes, which affect the social structure. They have also reshaped the direction and logic of various social constructs, what often reveals the features of future conflicts and crises. The ability to detect “weak signals” of future changes is an important skill of a modern professional. The digital environment forms a wide range of tools, including those with a simple interface and a set of functions. The combination of such tools allows researchers and those who are interested in understanding the features of modern society development to discover interesting facts and uncover non-obvious contradictions, formulate hypotheses and topics for deeper research. The COVID-19 pandemic has launched new processes for the global community and has become the reason for the emergence of a new "covid" normality. The new normality is manifested in changes of habitual practices - wearing masks, introducing QR codes to visit public places, predetermining the route of movement. One of the manifestations of the new normality was also the appearance of specialized COVID-19 sections on the Internet pages of the leading not only world and country, but also regional media. Within the framework of this course, using the situation with the COVID-19 pandemic as the case to research, we will learn how to aggregate information presented in open sources, build correlations, and research hypotheses. The course is distinguished by an emphasis on using available online tools for quick, but at the same time, diverse data analysis. A significant result of the course will be obtaining an informational portrait of the country in the light of the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.