HACKER Q&A
📣 acmegeek

Looking for a fictional or modern historical journal or diary dataset?


I'm working on an unusually useful way to leverage a daily journal. I've built a pretty complex system/app, but it uses my personal daily journal, and am at the point where I'd like to demo it to others.

It incorporates some pretty useful features that I haven't seen anywhere else. For my personal journal, I tend to have 5-10 entries per day, so it would be best to showcase a decent volume of data, at least hundreds of entries going back a couple years.

I've search all the usual places and just haven't found something that would work. Ideally it would be from a relatively modern perspective, like within the last 50 years or so, but I guess it could work from older. And for now would prefer something in English and in parsable/plain text format.

Does this ring a bell for anyone?


  👤 derbOac Accepted Answer ✓
Not sure if this is what you're looking for but this is classic in the psychological community:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Letters_from_Jenny/iVQN...

It's been analyzed for personal themes etc and the subject of lots of methodological discussion over the years.

The tricky part is that I'm not sure it's currently available in digitized form. It might be, or you might have to scan it and then read it with OCR.

The other problem is copyright issues perhaps?

Revisiting it with modern analysis methods would be pretty interesting actually now that I think about it.