Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

29 Nov 2021, 11:05 a.m.

A Cool Thing That Could Exist

Recently I read Tim Cahill's entertaining Road Fever, a memoir from 1987. Cahill briefly mentions the news of Black Monday intersecting with his road trip, which reminded me that Black Monday plays a much larger role in Michael Lewis's autobiographical Liar's Poker.

Thus -- I am not going to make this, but some enterprising digital humanities person with access to, like, the Google Books and Amazon ebook datasets could theoretically do it:

An interactive way to explore all the memoirs/autobiographies/diaries/letters ever published for references to things happening on particular dates. So you could see a sampling of different things people around the world noted down on or regarding a particular day -- like, wouldn't it be interesting to read, side-by-side, what Jawaharlal Nehru, Johnny Cash, Jane Jacobs, and Junichiro Koizumi had to say about August 6, 1945?

If this already exists, lemme know.

Comments

Marnanel
https://marnanel.org
30 Nov 2021, 13:56 p.m.

This would be fascinating. Then someone else could build on it to add geolocation and so on...