Genealogical research is not about generating new information; it is about trying to find information that already exists somewhere, in some inconvenient format, and re-entering it. It is using human brains to look for pointers in written records and joining those records by hand. As more and more records are digitized, or collected originally in digital form, it is utterly insane that human researchers should still be required to engage in this menial work. No one should have to slave away manually searching through old records looking for the pointers that connect one human to another in the family graph. The greatest potential revolution in genealogy lies not in new software to streamline the process of doing research, but in software that eliminates the human bottleneck entirely. The pinnacle of genealogical technology will have arrived when family trees assemble themselves, requiring only that someone ask.
That is a fine idea going forward, and for people who use Facebook. However, going backwards to people who lived and died before Facebook was a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg's eye won't be easily linked by Facebook. How could we automate that part?
ReplyDeleteThere is only one part of the process that I am not confident could be fully automated, and that is handwriting recognition. Without major breakthrough advances in computer literacy, humans will be required to read old records and put them into digital form. We will probably always have indexing. But that should be the extent of it. Once records are in a database, it should be trivial to automatically connect them.
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