BYU Family History Technology Workshop -- Curt B. Witcher, MLS, FUGA, IGSF

After a very interesting couple of hours with app demos and discussions, we got the opportunity to hear a presentation from Curt B. Witcher, MLS, FUGA, IGSF of the Allen County Public Library talking about the future of genealogy. Quoting, "Everybody has a story..." Stories are important in establishing that everyone counts and has an important place in society. As usual this is a report of what is said, filtered through my own impressions.

If more people than ever are involved in "genealogy" where are they? Curt made a reference to the increase of interest in family history. I guess I have the same question, what do we mean by family history? What is it that I do?

The new generation is interested in fun and success and involved with technology. He shows the MyHeritage.com video about the quick discovery of ancestors.

He talks of present needs of Integrated Library Systems that need to begin having databases talk to each other, marrying meta-data to the user experience. Using the WorldCat.org OCLC catalog to help to normalize the data. The catalogs should be able to be searched for specific information rather than letting it hide behind the cataloging system. He shows how a digitized record of a book in the FamilySearch.org program is not available to someone looking in another institution.  My impression is that we have moved a tremendous distance in this direction but there is still a residual need for people to think and do their own research. It would be an amazing development is we had context searching, but now, this is the still the purview of the individual researcher.

Results that are returned from searches should lead to additional data. There should be a way for an individual family file, including all of the data, to be compared and searched in "innumerable databases including facial recognition and DNA results. In other words, he wants to expand the capabilities of searching to include all relevant data.

What's wrong with GEDCOM? We can do better than that. We need to have a way to transfer and preserve different media even those images and files, both video and audio, that are in existence.

Opportunities for expansion include mobile and wearable. We need to incorporate surveillance technology such as drones and wearable audio. We need to apply science and virtual reality. Can we come up with a reconstructed picture of what our ancestors looked like?

This is a very interesting view of what is possible in the future. We need to probe who we are to find out more about our ancestors. This was a very thought provoking discourse and very useful to make me start more thinking.

BYU Family History Technology Workshop -- Lightning Talks

Charles Glancy, Peer Trees BYU Family History Technology Workshop

Each of these presenters at the BYU Family History Technology Workshop had only a very few minutes. I could not possibly give more than an overall impression of the presentations. Here is the list of the presenters:

1. Wesley Eames, AncestorCloud
2. Jeff Haddon, HistoryLines
3. Kent Andersen, A Life Story
4. Steve Pedersen, RootsBid
5. Charles Glancy, Peer Trees
6. Jed Wood, Generasi
7. Nathan Brakke, Soal
8. Ian Davis, Poppy Prose
9. Aaron Shelley, Family Feats
10. Matthew Faulconer, GenMarketplace
11. Doug Kennard, Historic Journals
12. Dan Rodziewicz, BYU Family History Technology Lab
13. Glen Chidester, ScanStone
14. Jessie Young, One Page Genealogy
15. Robert Ball, Where Am I From? Showing Geospatial Location of Ancestors Through A Generational Perspective 
16. Ben Baker and Joel Thornton, Viewing Closest Relatives in the My Relatives View of FamilySearch Family Tree
17. Joohan Lee & Geoffrey Draper, Timeline-Enhanced Portrait Charts
18. Curtis Wigington, William Barrett, Virtual Pedigree
19. Jordan Montierth, Grandma's Pie
20. Alan Cannaday, Auto-Zoning Newspaper Articles for the Purpose of Corpus Development for Training OCR Systems
21. Peter Ivie, Evan Ivie, Record linkage confidence through top match score analysis
22. Brian Davis, William Barrett, Scott Swingle, 3D graph cut: Extending min-cut segmentation to handle overlap of cursive handwriting in tabular documents

My overall impression is that this is a fabulous time to be involved in genealogy. The technology will make a huge difference in the way we view the subject in the future. The older genealogists are not going to be prepared for all these changes for the most part. You can have a really interesting time learning about these programs. I will be very interested to write about these programs in the future. I have a long list right here of post topics.

Many of these programs focus on a connection with FamilySearch.org. I would think they will show up sometime in the FamilySearch Apps Gallery. I also got an understanding how short a time a two minute presentation takes. Many of these programs (apps) are focused on stories and history. I guess my questions arise as to how we connect stories into an accurate and well documented context. Another area is integrating timeline and historical context with family tree information. There is a basic assumption that the information in a particular family tree is accurate and that integrating that information is also accurate. I don't think I have quite the same level of confidence in the content of online family trees. 

Some of these programs are aimed at crowd sourcing research tasks and monetizing the crowd sourcing by paying researchers to add information to online family trees. 

Many of these programs are in the development stage but a few are already in use on the Internet. All of these programs are network based. Very few, if any, would be considered a "stand alone" program. It is apparent that the day of selling a program on a disk or CD is now dead. There is still software out there on disks of some sort, but their days are numbered. 

I have to remark on Scanstone from BYU. This is a deal changer in automatically transcribing headstones. One BYU app that will show up shortly involves relationship views on FamilySearch Family Tree. The program will shortly show the proximity of relatives and expand the viewer to show your relationships to others. BYU also has the virtual pedigree, a new way of viewing records on FamilySearch. See Virtual Pedigree. Another programs involves Auto-zoning newspaper articles for the purpose of corpus development for training OCR systems. This program is aimed at OCR reading of obituaries. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," Arthur C. Clarke. 

One of the challenges I see is that if we assume that all of these really good ideas are put into applications, the quantity alone will become an issue. This is a good example of a type of feature creep, where new features begin to obscure some of the basic goals of doing family research. 

The First Day -- BYU Family History Technology Workshop

Joseph Shumway, AG at BYU Family History Technology Workshop

Tuesday, February 10, 2015 starts out early with breakfast and a conference at the BYU Convention Center on the Brigham Young University campus. I am here at the BYU Family History Technology Workshop. The keynote is presented by Joseph B. Shumway, AG on "Life of a 21st Century Genealogist: What do they do, and what do then need in the future." Joseph is at ProGenealogists presently owned by Ancestry.com. As is usual for me in attending conferences, I will be summarizing the presentations as they occur.

Joseph begins by explaining that professional genealogists is a growing profession. Most professionals have no degrees in genealogy. Most professionals work independently and part-time. There are only two accreditation organizations; ICAPGen and BCG. Most clients are new to genealogy and want the work hired or lawyers tracing missing heirs. At ProGenealogists they also work on documentation for television programs on genealogy.

Historically, genealogy has been for older people. Now, Joseph sees a increase in interest among middle-aged, pre-retirees. There is also a significant interest in the younger 25-40 age group who are more tech savvy. This means that people expect more cloud-based, mobile options and better ways to share and collaborate. I certainly agree with this assessment, but I am not seeing quite so many younger people who are involved.

People are looking for fun and interactive and sharing their ancestors' stories. The real stories are what get people interested. I have some very definite ideas about this aspect of genealogy, but on to the presentation.

Joseph analyzes the approach of beginners vs. professionals to genealogy. He spends a lot of time fixing trees. So do I. He observes that beginners are usually stopped in their research when the "easy" records run out. More advanced, i.e. professional researchers spend more time assembling "evidence to build a case." (We are back to law?) Professionals do their research by building a base of family, associates and neighbors, reconstructing neighborhoods and establishing an historical context.

This is a very interesting perspective and concurs with my own very closely. It is always interesting to find out that you agree with a professional. By the way, he talked about having a tree rating system.

BYU Family History Technology Workshop

For an interesting introduction to the huge RootsTech 2015 Conference, Brigham Young University is holding a Family History Technology Workshop on the BYU campus the day before the big conference on February 10, 2015. This one day conference is described as:

The Family History Technology Workshop has been held for 15 years, at both BYU and at RootsTech in Salt Lake City. Attendees include researchers, software developers, and professionals, brought together by their shared passion for improving family history technology.

The 2015 Family History Technology Workshop will bring together developers, researchers, technology professionals, and users to discuss the future of family history technology and genealogical research. The workshop will feature developer sessions, lightning talks, technical presentations, panels, and demos to showcase emerging and future technologies.

 The program and schedule will be announced on February 1, 2015. Registration is now open and costs $60 which apparently includes a light breakfast and lunch.

Since I live less than five minutes away from the BYU Convention Center where the conference is being held, I decided to attend. This will make for a lot of blog posting and a longer RootsTech week.