The Lightening Talks just finished here at the BYU Family History Technology Workshop. Presenters had about two minutes to tell us what they were working on in the tech field. Wow! What a fascinating session. Following are the sessions given, with my notes. It’s not a perfect listing, in that I could not always get presenters names. But it’s a list of new and upcoming apps (broadly put) I’m sure I will refer back to a lot.
Ancestorcloud – Wesley Eames
Put a request for out there and collaborate with others. Coming later in the year.
Historylines – Jeff Haddon
A site to take an existing tree, and figure out what an ancestor’s life was like, using historical events. Plots lifespans of the family on the map and describes peoples lifestyles, Editable.
RootsBid
Request research to be done, anywhere in the world. Onsite people can bid on a micro-task doing research.
Per Trees – Charles Glancy
Improve edits on Family Tree. Declare persons and relationships in a Watch List. You are made a reviewer for all changes
Generasi – Jed Wood
Time” is typically missing in family tree views. A timeline is added to the view on the side of the page, which covers several generations.
Soal – Sounds of a Lifetime – Nathan Brakke
Photos don’t tell the whole story. No voice lasts forever. Record the sounds. This can be shared via twitter, facebook, etc.
Poppy Prose – Ian Davis Ian was next to me at the table.
A story-centered approach to family history. A team of writers help users to write their story.
Family Feats – Aaron Shelley
Feat focuses – like immigration, military service, pioneers, etc. These items are added to Family Tree.
GenMarketplace – Matthew Faulconer
Identifies research opportunities – jobs are posted with changeable – rather silent auction style prices.
Historic Journals – Doug Kennard
Has an archive where people can share. Also has Mormon databases.
Family History Technology Lab – Dan Rodriewicz
Automatically finds ancestors and relatives
see fhtl.byu.edu
Relative Finder – connect instantly, share resources – coming soon.
Scanstone – Glen Chidester
Seeks to automate extracting the data from headstones. Starts with the smartphone. Take a picture, process, recognize the text with a live look-up Teh program then transcribes the data and looks to see if it’s in Find-A-Grave.
One Page Genealogy – Jessie Young
Print your entire family tree on one page. User customizable – can be downloaded as a pdf for printing.
Robert Ball – Where Am I From?
Charts where the family is from generation by generation – page by page – you can see what percentage of a nationality you are quickly. Shows historically correct historical boundaries.
Joel Thornton with FamilySearch
A New Relationship viewer for FamilyTree
also – Viewing Closest Relatives in the MyRelatives View in FamilySearch and Family Tree.
Timeline Enhanced Portrait Charts
Joohan Lee – from Korea
Traditional Fan Chart has text only.
Shows different pictures by generation, using a slider. Associates pictures with names. Easily used on an Android.
Using data from the FamilySearch website. Ios and Windows versions.
Virtual Pedigree – Curtis Widdington
A program the collapses and expands the pedigree as one looks at it.
Grandma’s Pie
Uses FamilySearch Family Tree. It makes an interactive pie showing where the family is from.
Auto-zoning newspaper articles for OCR systems – Alan Cannaday, FamilySearch
Remove clutter
Post-clutter removal
Remove noise
Word Zoning is then done, then article zoneing, making corrected zones so the OCR can be done better.
Record Linkage Confidence Through Top Match Score Analysis – Peter Ivie, University of Notre Dame
The program scores data-matches automatically.
3-D Graph Cut:Extending Min-Cut Segmentation to Handle Overlap of Cursive Handwriting in Tabular Documents – Brian Davis
Dual assignment segmentation. Be able to separate overlapping letters.
