Kindred Britain by Stanford University

The Kindred Britain project is a digital humanities project that shows how historical figures, mainly from Britain, are related through mutual connections.

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Home page of the Kindred Britain website. Each blue or purple dot represents a person.

The purpose of this project is to relate any two iconic British figures to each other. The project has almost 30,000 people stored in the database. A user chooses two people and the program shows the relationship between those two people. The two people are usually never directly related. The relationship usually consists of many different kinds of relationships between different people. Here is an example of the relationship between Sir Isaac Newton and William Shakespeare:

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Display after making a connection between two people.

This is a very distant relationship, as there are 22 people connecting Newton and Shakespeare. In the top half of the screen the user can see how exactly the two people are connected. The lines connecting each person in the relationship are color-coded to show if they are married or blood related. In the bottom half of the screen the user can see the life-spans of each person and when they crossed paths with each other.

It is very clear how extremely important the visualization aspect is to this project. The project displays the connection rather than stating, “Isaac Newton was William Shakespeare’s granddaughter’s father-in-law’s brother-in-law’s sister’s grandson’s wife’s sister’s grandson’s wife’s great-great-grandfather’s brother’s great-great-grandson.” Statements like these might give the user a headache and they will not want to use the program anymore. The visualization technique is what makes the project so sleek and easy to use.

The networking method is the base of the project. The project probably consists of a program containing an algorithm that starts from each person and iterates through their relatives until a common relative is found. The network method fits with the scholarly subject matter because the project is relating two people to each other through their common connections. This creates a whole network of people, which is where the visualization method takes over neatly displays the web of relationships.