Thursday, February 13, 2014

"Crowdsourcing and the Genealogy Boom" on NPR's On Point with Tom Ashbrook radio show

Genealogy had some excellent nationwide exposure today in the National Public Radio show, On Point with Tom Ashbrook.

You can listen to the 45 minute segment at http://onpoint.wbur.org/2014/02/13/genealogy-family-tree-cousins.  Click on the red arrow to make it play.  You can advance the show to a specific time point by clicking on the growing time bar.


The guests are:

*  A.J. Jacobs, who wrote an interesting article "Are You My Cousin?" in the New York Times two weeks ago.

*  Judy G. Russell, law professor, certified genealogist and author of The Legal Genealogist blog.

*  Dr. Spencer Wells, geneticist and director of the Genographic Project at National Geographic.

Tom starts with A.J., brings in Judy after a few minutes, takes some listener calls with research stories and questions, and eventually gets Dr. Wells on.  A.J. goes on about his experiences with the Geni.com inter-connected trees.  Tom uses his own, and A.J.'s experiences and knowledge, to quiz Judy on DNA research, accuracy in online trees, etc.  Wells covers human migration, pedigree collapse,

It was all interesting and very well presented by all of the participants.  I thought that I wanted to hearm ore from Dr. Wells.  Judy did really well answering the genealogy research questions, presumably without any forewarning.  A.J. was interesting too.

I did a little Geni.com research while I was listening and found that A.J. is my 7th great aunt's 6th great nephew's ex-wife's first cousin once removed!  Of course he is... here's the chart that shows the trail:


Well now, that was fun and interesting!!!

If the spirit moves you, please listen to this broadcast on NPR.  You can access it at http://onpoint.wbur.org/2014/02/13/genealogy-family-tree-cousins.  Just click on the red arrow to make it play.

Congratulations to Judy for being such a great evangelist for documented genealogy research.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2014/02/crowdsourcing-and-genealogy-boom-on.html

Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Really interesting, thanks​!​

I think that you would be really interested in some recent research that I have come across explaining crowds, open innovation, and citizen science.​ ​In particular I feel you may find these two emerging pieces of research very relevant:

- The Theory of Crowd Capital
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2193115

- The Contours of Crowd Capability
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2324637

And you may also enjoy this blog about the same too:
https://thecrowdsociety.jux.com/

Powerful stuff, no?