You step off the ferry onto the Isle of Barra off the west coast of Scotland. It's gray, foggy, and lovely. You open up your Victorian Laptop and begin to write about what you see, as if you were the first person ever to document this experience. 

Of course, you're not. Samuel Johnson did the same in the 1770's and his reflections on Barra begin to appear on the screen above your writing. Soon after, a page from a returning Scotsman appears (written several generations later), and then notes and sketches from a linguist who visited a decade ago.... 

The Prototype

The current prototype has a database of several hundred pages from travel journals, diaries, and  letters written in and about the Boston area from Colonial times to the middle of this century. Each passage entered by a user is matched with a passage from the database, according to topic, and proper nouns found. Research in text segmentation and analysis, information retrieval, and story understanding is in progress, with an eye toward making increasingly effective matches, and building coherence into the emergent dialog.