I’ve hummed and ha-ed about making this into a blog post because it’s just my notes so far.  It may not make a whole lot of sense to anyone but hopefully someone will get in touch who can further my thought processes or help me come up with an end result.

I’m a member of Hackerspace Adelaide so I’m already into the ‘hacker’ mind set.  ‘Hacker’ isn’t a dirty word.  Someone who breaks into people’s computers, websites etc and steals their data is known as a ‘cracker’.  You’ll see another definition of hack below.

These are my notes:

Hack – to change use of, make new from old, build, rebuild, modify, to give added features, make it do something it was never intended to do

Genealogy – data, facts and figures, photos, documents, stories, people, audio, video

Traditional genealogy – produce a family tree, charts, a book, maps, tree on a website, give talks, write articles

What can I produce from the large amount of data I’m generating?

– mashups
– visualisations
– interactive maps
– physical interactive things
– virtual interactive things

This whole thing is about bringing data to life for an audience and for me too!!

What data can be drawn from a .gedcom file other than a family tree?

.gedcom is a text file therefore much data can be pulled from it.

How do you take data from a .gedcom file to create something other than a family tree?

This is the big question here at the bottom, how can I take data from a .gedcom file to create a visualisation or a mashup or any of the other things I’ve listed.  I have a couple of people I can pose this question to but I wanted to put it on my blog to see if I get any other responses and to see if anyone else is doing similar work.

 

Some explanatory links:

Technology Hacker

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker

Gedcom

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDCOM

Genealogy Research On The Web Utilizing Organised Guidelines – A senior research paper by Anna Sterling.

http://www2.stetson.edu/mathcs/people/students/research/pdf/2010/asterling/proposal.pdf