Kindred Britain: An Introduction

Nicholas Jenkins, Elijah Meeks and Scott Murray will present their work on Kindred Britain, a new Stanford digital humanities website, published by Stanford University Libraries.
 
This interactive site presents a vision of British culture and history seen through the lens of family ties. Kindred Britain is built on a customized database of nearly 30,000 individuals who either are British or have a familial relationship to a British person. Records in the database span the last 15 centuries and include the noteworthy and the notorious – from prime ministers, novelists and scientists to lunatics, misfits and criminals. Kindred Britain can show a family link between any two people in the database. The site can quickly diagram how a monarch connects to a sea captain, a composer to a squire, a diarist to a doctor, a poet to a banker.
 
Jenkins, Meeks and Murray will talk about the process of creating Kindred Britain, about the site's technical and design architecture, about Kindred Britain's place in the landscape of digital humanities projects and about the possibilities for intersections between humanities scholarship and the web.