Documenting Ourselves
I stumbled upon a time-series of photographs taken by a Brasilian couple over the years from 1976 through to the present. How can one help consider the context of your own life when seeing something like this. It is the most personal example of the type of visual exposition of which Edward Tufte is so obsessed.
Without knowing these people, I am drawn into who they are, how they are changed. The sharing of a mortal timeline of my own, though parallel and distant from theirs, stirs some kind of temporal sympathy. Offspring, accomplishment, partners, friends, are suddenly drawn out in similar lines before me, and I am reminded that there is nothing that communicates so much information to us as another human face.
The web is the first repository of our shared lives, and there is no reminder so potent as this one. What will happen when future technologies spread before us the passage of our ideas, aspirations, economies, personal lives, and politics in a semantic swarm of navigable canals more potent than we can imagine?
We are just beginning to understand that the web is more valuable as an audit of our existence than a utility of the moment. While the web at first fooled us into believing in a new, undifferentiated economy of like-thinking highly literate people in a new homogenous culture, the reality is obviously quite different. The immediate value of the web is only realised if geography, culture, and immediacy are solved in ways we cannot yet anticipate. Connections and useful relationships which are solved simply and easily in the physical world are still elusive and distant in the electronic world.
The Wayback Machine has already shown us that history can be catalogued in a new way now. Google can take us on a journey through discussions and pages which span almost 2 decades. But, our ability to assemble this information into a cohesive time-line as striking as the Diego’s family time-line isn’t even considered yet.
It will be.
There are entire conferences dedicated to temporal data mining. Such technologies are at the foundation of what will become a temporal dimension to searching. Google fails miserably at this, so much that it is almost useless to ask Google to show you pages which have been updated only in the last 3 months. If you’ve tried this, you know that the majority of sites appear to have pages updated recently because of the mechanics of how websites work. So, temporal search is science fiction right now, as far as the average consumer.
A lot of the work on temporal engineering has gone silent in recent years. Before the web, temporal reasoning was the focus, deciding how software could give us ways to define, analyse, and predict causal relationships between events which happen in sequence. Information modelling theorests use temporary engineering theory to create more accurate UML process models. While alive and well, most temporal theorists in computing are engaged in such disciplines as predictive models in the Geosciences, or more arcane models of behavior targeting the creation of systems which monitor, or abstract this behavior (such as building traffic monitoring or economic trend analysis).
Because of the web, there has been an accelerated pace of research in temporal search theory but with very practical goals. The web clearly was the birth of the connection between lives and minds that would fuel future generations. The semantic web recognises deficiencies in the way pages relate, and will spawn new ways of organsing information on the Internet. As early as 2000, the semantic grid combines the idea of a semantic web with those of temporal navigation.
Imagine for a moment that your browser has a "Time Travel" slider in addition to all of its other gizmos. You also need to imagine that your browser is a thousand times faster, and that bandwidth is a word from the past. Downloading, displaying, moving from place to place, all of this is instantaneous.
Now, when you visit the front page of the London Times, you can see yesterday’s edition by using your time travel slider. You can move back weeks, months, years. In addition, links can go back in time. Links on the page can say "Last year at this time" and hyper-link to a genuine snapshot from the past. All sites inherit this temporal navigation, they don’t need to implement it, so it’s universal. Your blog is a temporal history of you, and the dimension of time becomes real and immediate.
Not only the dimension of time, but of place, and of intimacy. You can move toward more intimate views of the times, down into the people who run the newspaper, the photographers, you can slide back in time to see where they used to work, their old photographs, their own journals.
These are, of course, the same kind of words we’ve heard many times. The prophetic vision of the future. It’s easy to be cynical I suppose. But the truth is, despite the difficulty of implementation and the stumbling blocks of technology, this is the direction, we are heading there, and often faster than you think.
Roy Amara (in what he called his "First Law of Technology") said that there is a consistent pattern in our response to new technologies. We simultaneously overestimate the short-term impact and underestimate long-term impact. I believe this is true.
It’s a matter of time.
Tags: Personal
