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