I'm going to be at BarCamp in London on Saturday. I'm planning on giving an updated version of a session I ran at EuroFoo last September on time and the web.
Searching for content in the past is difficult, finding content in the same time period as older content is almost impossible. I mean finding 1960s stories about 1960s events, rather than finding 1990s and 2000s reporting on the history of the 1960s. Part of this is that we are very focused on now and the future (rss, I blame you), part of it is that the internet didn't exist then, so the content online is patchy.
However publishers are starting to put this kind of content on the web, the New York Times (sample article on the moon landing); the Washington Post; and my employer Nature spring to mind, though as paid for services. Google are offering a News Archive search with filtering by year and links to pay for archive stories from a range of USA papers, (Oscar Wilde from 1895).
We've got immense amounts of content already, how can we delve back into the past and find out about a period in history as more and more of our world is documented online and not in libraries.
I'll talk about what the issues are in exploring our past and how we can keep hold of what has happened, before all the primary witnesses die of old age. Persistence, geodata, time formats, content disambiguation and the grand sweep of history, how can you resist...?
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