November 6, 2007: Geni.com and Griots


I'm at DUX,[1] and spent part of the morning talking with Kevin Brooks,[2] a
story-teller who works for Motorola, and Suzanne Currie, a design researcher
at Medtronic. Kevin was telling us about the concept of the griot [3]:
West African story-tellers who maintain oral traditions for, among other
things, families. It got me thinking about how we tell family stories
today, and Geni.com [4] immediately sprang to mind.

Geni is a fantastic tool. You can use it to enter and visually manage your
family tree information. And if you enter your family members' email
addresses, they receive invitations to add their own family trees.
Naturally, the trees are connected, which is where things get really
interesting.

For example, I've added 50 people to my tree, and those relatives have in
turn added another 108. It's really quite fun to meander through my family
tree map and learn something about those 108 people who I'm somehow related
to but didn't know about: (view page at [5])

The index of last names also is fascinating, if nothing else for its ethnic
richness: (view page at [6])

But here's where story-telling could really help. Geni is almost like an
analytics application: it tells us the story's *what*, but not *why*. Why
did this family tree come to be shaped this way? Geni gets us part of the
way there--quite admirably--but it doesn't really tell us a family's story.

What could Geni do to support the telling of family stories in a more
narrative fashion? Could the support a griot toolset? Or partner with
modern day griots?

Once again, DUX--or at least the conversations between sessions--really got
me thinking...


BLOUG PERMALINK
http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/2007/11/genicom_and_griots_1.ht
ml

LINKS
[1] http://dux2007.org/
[2] http://www.media.mit.edu/~brooks
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griot
[4] http://www.geni.com
[5] http://www.geni.com/tree/index/31408
[6] http://www.geni.com/tree/names/31408