Kinship Editor

Kinship Editor

The KinshipEditor program is a simple graphical editor for entering kinship relations in the form of a fairly traditional kinship diagram. It can render all or part of the diagram as an image for inclusion in papers, slides etc. or the diagram can be translated into various forms for use as data for another tool or process.

KinshipEditor was designed to facilitate working with a wide range of conceptions of kinship, not limited to genealogy. Unions (marriages being an example) are the underlying nodes, with people representing connections to other unions. This is similar to the use of P-Graphs to describe genealogical data as described by White and Jorion (1992), though developed independently (and rather less mathematically precise) by Fischer (1994). The main goal is to describe relationships as defined by any group, and incorporate more of the group specific logic into the data, to eliminate the need for 'parents' in order to define 'siblings', and to be able to traverse people's relationships in a stateful manner regardless of shared ancestry. Fischer (1994) describes the specification and implementation of this logic in detail.

The output file is an XML dialect that is easy to transform into other formats for use in other tools or for analysis. Examples of the Kinship Editor and transforming its output into passive (a conventional family record) and active forms (as prolog predicates) are on the Experience Rich Anthropology site at:

http://era.anthropology.ac.uk/Era_Resources/Era/Kinship/index.html

The Kinship Editor is open source and available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/kinshipeditor

• Fischer, Michael (1994). Applications in Computing for Social Anthropologists (Chapters 6 and 7), Routledge: London and New York.
• White, Douglas R., and Jorion, P. (1992). Representing and analyzing kinship: A network ap- proach. Current Anthropology 33:454-462.

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