bigQuestions.com
"bigQuestions.com" mines the web and approximately 1000 world-wide library catalogues for data pertaining to various "big questions" of philosophy and religion. The result is a searchable database, which reveals how we contextualize these concepts, both culturally and linguistically. The most interesting (often amusing way) to proceed is to search not for the "big questions" but for other terms of
interest. This narrowing of focus gives us a kind of slice of life and reveals the ways in which those things which interest us are embedded in the universe of "big questions".
bigQuestions.com also has a real time display, where the visitor can
look into a small window of time during the data mining process as well step through the lines of the data-mining program code to watch how the data is collected.
These two functions are tied together by my sense of the Internet as
an intersecting of internal and external space and experience: in
terms of our subjectvity, there is the private space of the self at
the monitor and a seemingly limitless external supply of data waiting to
absorb the self; while on the technological level, there's the
internal space or depths of program code and the vast external reach
of networks.