Online Collaborative Kinship

I’ve been playing around with Geni.com. Its a social-networking site (like Facebook) built up around kinship. When you add a (living) relative you can also invite them to join your family network and they can contribute to the family tree. You can also add non-kin “friends” if you like.

I was thinking that this could be a very useful tool for some anthropologists – at least those working with English speaking web-savvy subjects. It could also perhaps be used to develop intellectual genealogies of the kind CKelty was talking about earlier.

I imagine that some kinship information, especially from non-European societies, might be hard to fit into the templates used by Geni.com. They do have some flexibility (for “domestic partners” for instance), but you are not able to define your own kinship terms, and you’re stuck with pink and blue blobs to mark binary gender identities. You can adjust your own privacy settings, but I’m not very clear how that works if another member of your family tree chooses settings different from your own. Still, I think it really shows how Web2.0 tools could be useful for not only collecting data, but also building an online community around the data collection process.

UPDATE: Turns out you can turn off the pink and blue coloring if you like.