Jamie Archer

As some readers may know I only recently set up this site and between my consulting work, web design and doing my own personal projects I've had barely enough time to really sit down and write about something meaty. I want to open up another dimension in social networking or rather I wish someone else would...

When I was talking with Mario F. Ruckh of My Heritage at the FOWA 2008 I was instantly grabbed by the concept of his site. It was nothing new mind you - yet another site that would facilitate the greater part of the middle classes in finding out whether they were related to nobility...yawn. Geneaology has never really excited or ignited passions in the wider public because it has always been such personal and private past time. The only time you would share your family history with outsiders was if it was somehow exceptional and interesting or if you thought it was exceptional and/or interesting. Most people's families aren't that interesting... or are they?

Leaving aside the grand stories of royal families and great dynasties, historians these days tend to relish getting their hands on primary source accounts of ordinary peoples lives. Social histories as opposed to royal-dynastic or military accounts can be more tedious and at times very difficult to uncover especially from the distant past but the data offered by primary source material about peoples lives, attitudes, socio-economic backgrounds and motivations could be far higher more valuable.

MyHeritage.com is currently in its fourth round of funding and has an international staff. Its website provides comprehensive tools for recreating massive family trees though be careful because you can only go so far with your family before the owners charge to increase the size of your tree. What if we could combine family data to recreate social networks from the past and therefore trace histories of individuals back to perhaps 200-300 hundred years with fairly good accuracy before records really degrade. Some families may be traced up to a 1000 thousand years with a fair degree of accuracy due to the existence of primary souce books and artefacts that may confirm certain connections.

All of this information could also be geo-tagged and then combined with archaeological data or architectural/land ownership data to show a pattern of human interaction and movement that is more accurate than any historical social model yet in existence. Is Google doing this yet? I know that KML data in Google maps has time data associated with it so, for example, one can view Londons Financial District and view buildings from different time periods in multiple locations appearing and disappearing by using a time slider. It's pretty cool.

Now imaging taking a city like Split where the Emperor Diocletian built a palace which becaom a provincial capital and over 1500 years later still has people living within its ancient walls, some of whom can trace their family lines back 500 years or more due to the existence of some very musty books. Now lets imagine we can re-create the different phases of the architectural elements of the city and overlay that with the social data, familial connections and ownership patterns of the town.

As a historian I get so excited about these possibilities and yet as so often is the case the people working at my heritage never quite saw just how valuable their data wasfor social research and modelling. This because they are so desperately trying to monetise it and conventional internet business models (none of which are a guarenteed money earner in the long term) are capable of taking into account the intrinsic value of much of the metadata. Most business know that their data is valuable but even the hi-tech ones don't always see how they can leverage all aspects of it.

I'll be posting more on this topic as its my pet project to work on an interactive museum exhibit that will take advantage of these technologies...