Off-topic: Cultural "geneaologies'?

This is just a thought.... I wonder to what extent an existing geneaology mapping program could be used to map the relationships or connections between senior authors and junior authors over time (assuming that the coauthors can be regarded as the 'children' of lead authors)?

Or between generations of teachers and their students, and the students' students?

I am not actively planning to attempt such approaches, and understand that others are already analyzing the authors and citations of published scientific research articles in order to map scientific and disciplinary networks and their interconnections (i.e. the genesis of scientific knowledge).


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PJ Matthews, Kyoto
Migrated from Ning 2.0. Now at Jamroom 6 beta and using Jamroom Hosting for The Research Cooperative (researchcooperative.org)
updated by @researchcooperative: 04/06/17 01:43:45PM

Genosis should work well for this (if that is what you were thinking). Woulds want to update the language strings so it is "author" rather than "ancestor" centered, but the support for this would be there.


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

Thanks, I was wondering whether Genosis could be adapted in this way. The interest might be in generating geographical maps of first-author/second-author relationships over time and space, in literature from a given research field.

This might be a way of detecting, through author relationships, the authors who have really influenced a research field over time through their writing efforts, and could be contrasted with the so-called 'impact factor' approach which is focused more on who cites who in what journals.

There are many possible approaches to the question of how knowledge is generated in a particular discipline over time.

Family genaeologies are also interesting for cultural reasons - we think we are interested in the genetic relationships, but what is really interesting is seeing how family stories and knowledge are transmitted along with the physical geneaology. Which can be through the records of the occupations of our ancestors, for example. Mapping family occupations over time and space is what many family historians like to do. The puzzling over incomplete and scattered records is also a kind of science.


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PJ Matthews, Kyoto
Migrated from Ning 2.0. Now at Jamroom 6 beta and using Jamroom Hosting for The Research Cooperative (researchcooperative.org)