Kinsources is an open and interactive platform to archive, share, analyze and compare kinship data used in scientific research. Kinsources is not just another genealogy website, but a peer-reviewed repository designed for comparative and collaborative research. The aim of Kinsources is to provide kinship studies with a large and solid empirical base.
Kinsources combines the functionality of communal data repository with a toolbox providing researchers with advanced software for analyzing kinship data. The software Puck (Program for the Use and Computation of Kinship data) is integrated in the statistical package and the search engine of the Kinsources website.
Kinsources is part of a research perspective that seeks to understand the interaction between genealogy, terminology and space in the emergence of kinship structures. Hosted by the TGIR HumaNum, the platform ensures both security and free access to the scientific data is validated by the research community.
Started by Mike Fischer of the Center for Social Anthropology and Computing at the University of Kent (SCAC), Kinsources is actually developed within a research project funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR), involving research institutes University of Nanterre, the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), as well as the University of Kent (UKC), the University of California at Irvine (UCI), the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) at Nijmegen, Netherlands.
