The most important property in the SoapJack data is the date. This is not the date the video was uploaded to YouTube, but the date that soap opera episode was originally broadcast. No data can be accepted into the dataset without the date, in the format such as 12/25/1986.
Date sleuting
Whenever the channel owner includes the date in the title or in the description I want to send them a virtual cocktail. Even if it’s just the year, it’s a great start. If there’s an episode number, the date can likely be obtained from IMdb.com.
If no date or episode number is provided, we work with leads and hunches:
- Knowledge of major storylines and actors’ appearances over time.
- Web searches including Imdb.com, actor bios and storylines in Wikipedia.
- Fan websites. Some have quite comprehensive storyline details, but they don’t often note the dates.
- AI. Love in the afternoon and artificial intelligence pair quite well actually.
For this type of sleuthing, AI is getting more and more amazing. Get a load of this from Microsoft Copilot:
Question: On All My Children, what was the approximate broadcast date when Tom Cudahy found out that Erica was using birth control pills?
Answer: Tom Cudahy discovered that Erica Kane had been secretly using birth control pills on November 27, 1979 during an episode of All My Children. This revelation led to significant drama in their storyline. Soap operas really know how to keep the twists coming, don’t they?
I think AI will get more comprehensive of the soap storylines over time in getting to specific dates. At some point however, the internet won’t yield any more specific information so a semi-wild guess is the best we can do.
I’ve arrived at the following guidelines:
- If only a year is the best guess, put January 1 or June 1 if you think it happened during summer.
- For scenes you know that indeed in January or June, make it the first weekday of the month.
- If you’re not sure of the year, make it January 1 of the 5th year of the decade. Such as an old soap in the 50’s.
Researchers will then go through those January 1st dates to try and get them more accurate.
