biography assistant

searching-by-date is still very primitive

but if you pick a year
and do a google search
there's probably a wikipedia page of highlights from that year
and various similar lists

(the farther back in time you go
of course
the less there'll be)

if you're lucky
fans of the year you chose
may already have collated the best web resources about that year
...if you can find their collations

how the world looked
who did what when
(especially
obviously
the celebrities of the day)

what consumers consumed
relevant publications
databases
maps

with more resources being added all the time
with none collated at first


now
pick a place

can you recreate how that place
would have looked during that year?

as a sim in SecondLife
even?

which real people spent time
near that place
during that year

how many of their real home addresses
and biographical basics
can be filled in
using just web resources?


so
now
pick a person

you may know nothing about them

except that they must have been
somewhere
around that place and time

maybe
name gender birthyear deathyear


but all human lives
to some degree
share a universal shape

a paper-doll version
of infancy childhood adolescence adulthood

and the more we know of
any real other lives
around that time and place

the better we can guess the likeliest details
of diet customs religious beliefs tools clothes language sports
toys books music movies


the categories of data
that the quantified-self movement has started from
are comparatively narrow:

exact details of places
consumption
activities
socializing

so even if you track every movement and every purchase
almost all that data will be boring

and zeroing in on the important bits may be hard

repetitive patterns can be automatically summarized
along with trivial anomalies

while the more significant anomalies
can be presented in semi-natural language

so that at some point this starts to look
like a robotic novel of your life

that can be tailored toward
the classic 'paperdoll' version


your online activity can be collated similarly

and crossmatched against your known associates

of course
almost nothing like this will be available before 1990

maybe published letters
journalists' flamewars
rarely scanned photos


for detailed human interactions

we'll rely on fiction for models

fleshing out our paperdolls

with the most perfect universal
paperdolls
in ulysses