Your impulse to give DNS queries some significance is correct (IMO). They are one of the core information assets of a digital footprint/fingerprint.
In terms of mapping my visits to know what I was/am most interested in, do you have any suggestions on where I might start with a project like that. It sounds interesting, and like something I would enjoy participating in.
No, I don´t have any suggestions. Before I wrote my last post, I googled librarian´s schema just to make sure it is a word. I learned that there are what is called ontologies, which are used to train so called artificial intelligence. I don´t understand much of it, but I imagine coming up with an ontology in a coded form is quite a hard problem, because this ontology would have to be a representation of the world how it is conceptualized by our brains. So I was implying that mapping your queries is forbiddingly difficult.
What I have trouble getting my mind around here is just this: the mapping of a “phenomenon of interest” to DNS queries. It’s sort of intriguing, because IP addresses seem to contain a lot of interesting structure, but at the lowest level they don’t represent your perspective or experience ery clearly. This may be a case of “starting with the data” rather than “starting with the question” which tends to lead to a research-oriented project rather than something that has a high chance of being personally relevant. As research, though, it could be interesting to look at a derivative measure, such as “consistency” in the pattern of DNS queries, to reflect novelty seeking. I’m not sure that any signal would show up there, but you could explore it.
Thank you to everyone who has commented on or expressed interest in this little project. I have been encouraged by your feedback to continue onward, with further development.
If anyone is interested in the code/tools (applications) that I’m building for these analyses, you can find them here on GitHub. There are also instructions on how to export or download your Pi-hole data from another Linux PC.