KinOath Kinship Archiver Version 1.4

Abstract

This talk will introduce a new tool for Humanities research, in particular Ethnology, Linguistics, Law, History, but also Genetics and Archiving. This tool is KinOath Kinship Archiver which is an application for collecting and analysing kinship data. It is designed to be flexible and culturally nonspecific, which is important to prevent extraneous concepts being imposed onto the data being recorded. The kinship data can be linked to external resources such as archive data. Graphical representation of the data is a key feature, it produces publishable quality diagrams that can be exported to SVG, PDF and JPG formats. Data can be imported from GEDCOM, CSV and TIP files. Data can be exported into CSV format, with additional formats becoming available as plugins. KinOath provides very flexible data fields for each individual / entity recorded in the kinship data, this is combined with customisable relation types, customisable symbols and customisable kin types. This means, for example, that any number of genders and kinship relations can be defined and represented on a diagram. The most common format, GEDCOM (Family History Department, 1999), can be imported into KinOath. However this GEDCOM format exhibits cultural specificities because it has a predetermined set of kinship types, genders and initiation ceremonies. We know that there is a wider array of kinship types (e.g. suckling relations (Altorki, 1980)) and genders (e.g. the Māhū of Hawaiʻi (Matzner, 2001)). There are also initiation ceremonies beyond the Christian and Jewish ceremonies that are predefined in GEDCOM. However once this data is imported, all the flexibility of KinOath will be available. KinOath has project based diagrams and freeform diagrams. Freeform diagrams are like a quick sketch; while project diagrams each have a database of kinship data which can be shared across multiple diagrams. Project based diagrams also allow kin type string queries, such that individuals to be found based on their relations to others. Individuals in a project diagram can be duplicated and merged, which can be useful, for example, in correcting data, or merging multiple data sets where some individuals overlap. In freeform diagrams kin terms can be defined with kin type strings and shown on the diagram, organised in groups, imported and exported. In the future it will be possible to overlay these kin terms onto project diagrams. In order to perform statistical analysis, the kinship data for each project or freeform diagram can be exported for use in R or SPSS. This combined with queries based on kin types and other search parameters, provides great potential in the analysis of both the kin data and the archive data that has been recorded. The intended users of Kinoath are any researchers that collect data in a context of social relations. Kinship data is often not systematically included in the metadata of archives, however these kin relations provide a context that enriches that archived data. KinOath is in active development and new features are regularly being added. The plugin framework that KinOath shares with Arbil has made it possible for external developers to add features. The various versions and the manual are available at: http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tlatools/kinoath/ REFERENCES Family History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, 1999, THE GEDCOM STANDARD DRAFT Release 5.5.1 http://www.phpgedview.net/ged551¬5.pdf Matzner, Andrew. 2001. 'O au no keia: voices from Hawaii's Mahu and transgender communities. Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris. Altorki, Soraya. 1980. MilkKinship in Arab Society: An Unexplored Problem in the Ethnography of Marriage. Ethnology 19(2): 233-244