Re: Genealogy For The Beginner

Haines Brown <brownh@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
>> One of the problems with data display in modern genealogy programs is
>> that there is usually no way to communicate fuzzy truth.  In Legacy, I
>> can assign a confidence level to a source for a particular datum, but
>> unless someone digs down into the innards of my data and looks at that
>> confidence level, they'll never see it - it doesn't figure into any of
>> the displays or re****ts above the obscure footnote level that in fact
>> probably nobody will ever read, including me.  So I never bother
>> filling it in.
>
>Very interesting. What you are saying is that a print (printed page or
>on a browser) cannot accurately reflect the reality of the lineage with
>all its uncertainties. Normally when one prints something, what is
>printed is static, unambivalent. Is it possible to print uncertainty? A
>conventional way might be to use a dotted line rather than a solid line,
>or lines with different colors, although that would be unconventional
>and would require the display of a color key to indicate degrees of
>uncertainty.

I was think more in terms of a dynamic on-screen display, since I
think more people view genealogy data on a web page (or a display
screen from their genealogy software).  Print is rather too immutable.
But certainly, there are a few techniques that would work with print,
like those you mentioned.

>> I envision a tree display that would display the most likely choice,
>> but perhaps if you hovered on a particular link, it might display
>> multiple trees overlayed, with different colors or densities based on
>> relative likelihoods.
>
>That seems easy to do in CSS, but I suspect it is like your footnotes:
>people are unaware of the other possibilities until their mouse hovers
>over a person, fact or relation. For that matter, such as hover could
>easily cause a pop-up that provides the information about the
>uncertainty. But I get the impression your aim is to have the
>uncertainty immediately obvious rather than depend on the visitor to the
>site pursuing more information.

I'd like both.  I'm not saying it would be easy though.

www.familysearchlabs.org has done some experiments with pedigree and
genealogical data display that gave me the idea that some sort of
dynamic display might manage to convey this kind of information.  I
think they use Flash. (But for all that I used to program for a
living, I have no idea how any of this web-based programming works.  I
haven't yet figured out how to design my own home page %^).

 Incidentally, I was once interested in how
>to render a descendant re****t entirely in CSS. Here's my little
>experiment: www.hartford-hwp.com/genealogy/Brown/brown-1.html . I didn't
>try to develop this little rendition experiment because no one seemed
>particularly interested.  

I'm not sure exactly what you were trying to do, but it doesn't
display correctly in my browser (IE7).  The borders and the shading
and the text are all somewhat out of alignment with each other, such
that I don't know what the intended graphics are.  There are two lists
of what I presume are offspring (one offset to the right, and one
left-aligned and below) which I am guessing are connected to the two
wives mentioned in the first box, but that isn't conveyed by the
graphics as opposed to my analysis of the text.

lojbab