22/11/2013
We are pleased to announce the opening of Kinsources, an open interactive platform where you can archive, share, analyze and compare kinship data.
Dear friends and colleagues interested in our project,
It is a great pleasure for me to announce the launching of this collaborative website dedicated to the sharing of kinship data.
Born of a long-standing collaboration between Michael Houseman (EPHE, Paris) and Douglas White (UC at Irvine), our interest for computer analysis of kinship relations has continued to grow. The constitution of the TIP (Traitement Informatique de la Parente / Kinship and Computing) group in Paris and the development of analytical tools such as PUCK by Klaus Hamberger (EHESS, Paris ) marked a milestone in this field of study. The creation by Mike Fischer (U. Kent at Canterbury) of a prototype website for Kinsources was also an important step in the process that has led to the website we have the pleasure of now opening. We hope these collaborations will continue to develop and that our website Kinsources will prove instrumental in bringing together a community of researchers involved in this type of study, whether they be historians, demographers, sociologists or anthropologists.
Olivier Kyburz
Kinsources is not just another genealogy website, but a platform designed for comparative and collaborative research. The aim of Kinsources is to provide kinship studies with a large and solid empirical basis. Kinsources combines the functionality of a shared data repository with a toolbox providing researchers with advanced software for analyzing kinship data. The software Puck (Program for the Use and Computation of Kinship data) is integrated in the statistical package and the search engine of the Kinsource website.
Who can access datasets, and how? |
Who can contribute datasets, and how? |
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| Kinsources is an open platform freely accessible to everybody. Users can browse through datasets or search the archive using both metadata and dataset statistics as search criteria (for example, /give me all Amazonian datasets with more than 15% cross-cousin marriages/). Datasets can be downloaded in a variety of formats compatible with standard genealogy and kinship network analysis software (such as Gedcom, Pajek or Puck). Contributors can decide which parts of their datasets they want to make accessible for the general public or for their students and scientific collaborators, and under which license. | To submit a dataset for publication on Kinsources, it suffices to open a Kinsources account and upload the dataset, using the website”s submission form. Datasets are published if they meet the requirements of internal coherence, sufficient documentation and conformity to privacy protection. The submission process is supervised by a scientific committee composed of international experts from anthropology, history and social network analysis. On the eve of its opening to public contributors, Kinsources hosts about a hundred datasets from anthropologists and historians all over the world. The strength of Kinsources resides in the scope and quality of the datasets contributed by the scientific community! All researchers and research teams working in the field of kinship are invited to contribute! | |
Who is behind Kinsources? |
The scientific committee: |
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Started by the Center for Social Anthropology and Computing at the University of Kent, Kinsources is presently being developed within the framework of a research project funded by the French National Research Agency, involving research institutes University of Paris West - Nanterre, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, as well as the University of Kent, the University of California at Irvine, the University of California at Los Angeles and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen (Netherlands). Kinsources is hosted by the public French infrastructure /Huma-Num/. With already more than 90 corpus availables, we invite you to try the website functionnalities: browsing, searching, adding new corpus, take part of the forum, find tools and other useful websites! You can browse through datasets or search the archive using both metadata and dataset statistics as search criteria (for example, /give me all Amazonian datasets with more than 15% cross-cousin marriages/). Datasets can be downloaded in a variety of formats compatible with standard genealogy and kinship network analysis software (such as Gedcom, Pajek or Puck). To submit a dataset for publication on Kinsources, it suffices to open a Kinsources account and upload the dataset, using the website”s submission form. |
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