I’m back! :)

I’ve switched over to using a wiki for my productivity needs (to-do lists, research notes, etc.), and I’m more and more convinced that it’s perfect for genealogy research. It’s freeform, laughably easy to store, and the hyperlinks make it a piece of cake to stitch things together where needed (and when you think about it, researching genealogy is just that: you stitch evidence together to form people and then stitch them together to form families and lines). And wikis are collaborative, and most support revisioning.

The only real downside I can think of is that there aren’t any set fields for things like names and dates, so searching is basically just a full-text search unless you have some kind of parser that picks up fields automatically. (And it would be easy enough to add some codes to the wiki markup to let users specifically designate portions of text as dates or names or places or what have you.)

And in reality, doing it this way is far more flexible, which makes it much nicer when you move to the international playing field, dealing with hundreds and thousands of different languages and cultures. The rigidity of existing record managers has been acceptable, but we’re in a new era now, and we need something organic, something that can grow and mold itself to the needs of the user. And users have vastly different needs.

Back in November I mentioned my idea for a lightweight record manager, and here’s a mockup of what I think it’ll look like:

It’ll be very, very simple. Basically, there’ll be a small set of metadata for each person (the name, gender, and birthdate, as you can see in its own box), and then a wiki page where the user can enter whatever they want. It’ll use Textile for the editing (and to edit, you’ll just click on the wiki area, I think). There’ll be a modification to link to other people in the database (the green links) and to non-people pages (the red Anson County link). Other than that and a basic search, the only other feature (for now) will be the history tab, which keeps track of revisions.

And that’s it. It won’t take too long to put together, really. I’m not going to worry about GEDCOM import or pedigree charts or anything just yet — I’ll stick with the bare minimum, to ensure that this actually happens. :) The idea is to let the user organize their data the way they want to. To get out of the way, in other words. Not everyone wants that, of course, but I think it has the potential to be a very good thing. We’ll see if I’m right. :)

Oh, I upgraded to Rails 1.2 earlier but it didn’t work for some reason, so I’m reinstalling and hoping that it’ll decide to cooperate. If not, I may write the prototype in Python/Django instead.

As for the name, I figured I can’t keep calling everything Beyond. :)

Technorati Tags: Beyond, genealogy, family history

Alrighty, here’s a proof-of-concept for the linker I mentioned in my last post. After I’d used Flickr for a while, the drag-and-drop organizing became addicting, and I realized that it’d be perfect (I think) for organizing the people in your database. Here’s the Flickr layout:

You find your photos in the strip at the bottom, then drag them into the set you want them in. It’s that easy. So, taking the same idea and applying it to genealogy, I came up with this:

It’s quite rough, I’ll admit, but the gist of it should come across. The software would be smart enough to re-order the children in birth order, I’d imagine. The “Family” text in the upper left would create a new family. (It should be labeled “New Family” instead, on second thought.) “Other” would create other kinds of relationships — friends, employers, neighbors, etc.

So, instead of starting with the pedigree and filling in the blanks, you would enter people instead — without caring (at first) who goes in what families. After you’ve entered the people you’re interested in, then you’d go to the linker, find the people you just added, and drag-and-drop them into families.

Since it’s still just an idea, I don’t know if this is better/easier/faster than the traditional methods. Thoughts?

Technorati Tags: genealogy, family history, Flickr

The e-mails and comments I’ve gotten over the past week or so have resurrected my resolve to make Beyond a reality. After all, I do have free time; it’s just a matter of deciding how I spend it. And while making books is all well and good, I think Beyond probably deserves a higher priority.

That said, I’m now trying to figure out just what Beyond will be. There are a few problems that need solving, particularly collaboration, visualization, and user interfaces. I think I’ll focus on those. Stretching myself too thin — like butter on too much bread — will be bad.

What do I expect to come out of this? I do hope that my work here will result in a usable web app that I can use to do my genealogy, but I still see myself more as an R&D lab. If developers want to take these ideas and run with them, I’d be ecstatic. (Assuming the ideas are good, that is. :)) And yet I’m rather interested in writing a minimalist genealogy app as well. So we’ll see what happens.

I have an idea for a way to link families together, in a more user-friendly way, but it’s still in the works and I’m at my parents’ home so I don’t have access to Photoshop right now (and I won’t use MS Paint!), so suffice it to say that it’s kind of like organizing Flickr sets — people at the bottom, drag and drop into families or whatever kinds of relationships you want. (I’m still a firm believer that the new generation of genealogy apps needs to handle non-family relationships — friends, employers, debtors, whatever.)

I feel kind of tacky asking for continued comments and e-mails, but they really do make a difference. It’s probably part of being human. :)

Technorati Tags: genealogy, family history

I’ve been swamped lately and haven’t done much with genealogy other than stuff at work, but hopefully that’ll change. (Oh, the joys of school!)

First, thanks to Jasia for her mention of this blog in her Carnival of Genealogy:

We’ve already mentioned Dana Huff’s choice to use a blog to record her family history. Taking the same idea to a whole ‘nother level (or should I say planet?), we have Ben Crowder’s Genealogy 2.0 posted at BeyondProject.org. Ben discusses the need for collaboration on genealogy research but the conglomeration of apps he mentions would also create the ultimate recording of a family history, allowing for not just one author but many. I do believe this is the future of genealogy research folks. And probably the future of writing up the family history too.

Second, a week ago Dan Lawyer posted about better pedigrees. Here’s what it looks like:

This is the sort of thing I’ve dreamed about for a while. It’s really, really important to be able to see the whole picture; being zoomed in all the time makes it extremely hard to see the forest for the trees.

And as Dan says, there’s the cool factor. Smooth movement is fun. On my Mac, for example, hitting F11 makes all the windows fly to the edges of the screen so I can see my desktop; F9 takes all the windows on screen and makes them visible, kind of like putting photos on a table. And both of these are fun to do, just on the basis of watching the windows move around. Some may consider this sort of thing fluff, but it’s more important than you think. Far more important, actually.

In the comments for that post, Mark Butler mentions “persistent, user creatable, auto-updating charts that have just the persons or families or generations the user wants to include, ideally where the user has some layout control.” Sounds like smart folders/playlists/etc. in the Mac world. And I really like that idea! Imagine being able to say, “Show me a pedigree of all the people I’ve entered into my database in the last month,” or “Show me who had more than seven children,” or “Show me everyone who lived in Italy.”

Since these “smart pedigrees” would only hold a subset of one’s ancestors, it then becomes necessary to decide which way to display the results:

Option 1: Show everyone, but fade out those who aren’t in the results, like this:

This way you still see how people fit into the big picture, but you don’t have irrelevant results getting in the way either.

Other advantages of something like this (in coordination with being able to zoom and pan at will, of course) are that you could use it to show merging conflicts, or highlight certain tags (if you’re using a tag-based system), or spot migration trends (or any sort of trends, really), or any number of other very cool and very useful things.

For example, let’s say you’re using the tag “to-do” to mark the people and families you’re currently researching. When you feel you’ve done enough on that person or family, you remove the “to-do” tag. Now, if you set up a smart pedigree to highlight any “to-do” tags, it’ll automatically show you where you’re working at any given moment. As soon as you tag a new person, or remove an existing tag, the smart pedigree will be updated.

Option 2: Only show the results. This would be tricky because you’d end up needing many small pedigrees, all floating around in space unconnected to each other. I don’t recommend it.

I’d say that smart pedigrees are a must-have in any 21st-century genealogy app.

Technorati Tags: genealogy

Yesterday morning I was thinking about sparklines and how they might be used in genealogy, and after a few quick sketches I came up with this:

Here’s how it works for individuals: the first black dot is their birth. Each pixel is one year. The final dot is their death. Any middle dots are the person’s marriage(s). It’s nice because you can see at a glance how long they lived (in comparison to others), whether they married early or late (and how many times), and so on.

For families, the first dot is the marriage year. The last is the year the second parent died or a divorce year, whichever comes first. Any dots in between are children. Again, it provides a lot of information in a small space — how long they were married, how many children and how they were spaced, etc.

I originally thought of using different colors for the various dots (you can see a glimmer of this in the family sparkline for Tom & Jane Smith), but I’m now thinking it’d be better to leave them monochromatic so that they can still carry all the information when printed/displayed in black and white. (The line could be black instead of grey, of course.) Once the rules are understood (what each dot means), there’s no need for colors to differentiate them.

You could also use these when writing family histories:

If including them inline isn’t your style, you could always use footnotes or sidenotes:

I’m in the middle of figuring out if there’s a good, compact way to represent one’s ancestors via sparklines. I’ll post again if I come up with anything. Oh, and I haven’t written any code to generate these genealogy sparklines yet, but soon… :)

Any thoughts?

Technorati Tags: sparklines, genealogy

It’s been a while, eh. No, Beyond is not dead — she’s just asleep for a little while. A number of other projects are keeping me exceedingly busy at the moment, but most of them will be over by the end of August. I wish things could happen sooner, but it’s probably not possible.

From Information Aesthetics, I read about Simile, an Ajax widget for timelines. Quite interesting. I’m not sure yet if I’d use it in Beyond — I’ll have to look into it some more — but it’s certainly a possibility.

As far as other updates go, other projects are eating up most of my time right now, but things are progressing (albeit slowly).

Got the people list working, along with a few little bits and pieces here and there. It’s time to write out a roadmap and set some deadlines. I’m a lot more comfortable with Ruby on Rails now than I was two weeks ago, and it’s making a huge difference. I love Rails. :) Anyway, I’ve still got to figure out how the linking is going to work — the idea is clear in my head, but I don’t have a clue how the user interface will be. Yet. :)

Back in the mid-1800s, my ancestor Robert Shanks bought and sold a fair amount of land. One name that came up more than once was that of a Mr. Atkinson (I can’t remember his first name), a man who seemed fairly well to do.

Now fast-forward to today. I’m trying to find more information about Robert, but nothing seems to be coming up. If I know that he was somehow connected with Mr. Atkinson (through business transactions, in this case), I could start researching Mr. Atkinson to see if anything shows up. For all I know he could have been Robert’s father-in-law, or perhaps Robert’s family had lived with the Atkinsons for a few years, or Robert and Mr. Atkinson started a business together, or any number of other possibilities.

Now imagine being able to find one of Mr. Atkinson’s descendants, someone who’s been researching that very line and has a wealth of information about Mr. Atkinson, including his journal — which just happens to mention Robert Shanks.

Or pretend your ancestor Humphrey Call had a brother, Josiah, who lived hundreds of miles away from Humphrey and died without ever marrying. You’ve come to a dead-end with their line, but you suspect Josiah may have inherited the family Bible (he was the eldest, after all) and a number of other heirlooms. He wasn’t on speaking terms with Humphrey at his death, though, which is why they’ve disappeared.

Another researcher is working on the line of Michael Indigo, who happened to live in Josiah’s neighborhood. And this researcher finds a bunch of information for the Call family in Michael’s belongings — the family Bible, the love letters of Humphrey and Josiah’s parents, and a number of deeds for the family land. Turns out Michael and Josiah were friends.

So then the researcher adds Josiah Call to Michael Indigo as a friend. You get a message saying someone’s added Josiah Call to the database. You check it out and voila, turns out it’s the same Josiah, and you see that this researcher has a gold mine of records for your ancestors.

That’s the power of including non-family relationships in an interconnected online genealogy network. And that’s just one of the many cool things that Beyond will make possible.

(And just for the record, all of that stuff about Mr. Atkinson was completely made up, other than his name and the fact that he had land transactions with Robert Shanks. And the Call family and Michael Indigo are fictional as far as I know.)