My cousin Bilal was beavering away on my VAIO, in the corner of the lounge this evening, while we checked out some photos.
He started out looking up dinosaurs for some school work, but ended up building a SimCity style model village using Bekonscot Model Village’s Virtual Village app. This is what he came up with…cue huh?
I’m going to give him my old copy of Sim City 3000 and line up some LEGO for his next birthday
When I was around sixteen, I started to map out my extended family and try trace back my ancestry as far as I could from elderly relatives…after a few weeks research, I ended up with a huge A2 pencil drawn family tree.
At that time, I counted around 80-90 people across five generations. Asian families can have convoluted structures; people have lots of kids (a very horizontal tree) and there’re quite a few marriages between cousins; (very horizontal and um, loops?).
Around 1992, using my beloved Amiga 1200, I transcribed the tree into an AmigaGuide hypertext document, with some simple profiles of each family member…and there it languished for almost fifteen years…a dead document of my family, frozen in time and awaiting the advent of HTML and the Web 🙂
Recently with my work in social networking platforms and technologies, I began to think about re-inventing my family tree as a network of relationships that could be visualised in many different ways – trees, maps, graphs etc. – and where each family member would maintain their own profile and relationships. Maybe this could be a service that other people could use too and connect their various family trees together.
Well today, my erstwhile employers covered the launch of David Sack’s Geni – a very cool online family tree service. Within fifteen minutes I’d sketched out five generations and a couple dozen family members; Geni even let me use the service without signing up, but actually completing my registration as I used the tools.
It’s still missing a few of the specific tools I’d need, but I think it’s time for me to revisit my tree and turn it into a living digital document of my خندان. Geni allows you to invite the relatives you’ve added and help build out their part of the tree and their personal profiles.
In case you’re wondering about the screengrab, that’s me in the corner.
The month of Shawwal has been a symmetry of life and death for our family, bracketed by the passing of loved ones and punctuated by the arrival of new lives.
Twenty eight days ago, on the bright, crisp Autumn morning of Eid-ul-Fitr, we lost our beautiful baby sister Aisha after a long and debilitating illness…just three days ago, a distant cousin and my uncle Jawaid died suddenly and unexpectedly.
However, amidst our sorrow, I became an uncle myself with the arrival of my cousin Nadia‘s newborn son, Idris,…only days later, my youngest cousin Yousef was born.
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Last Friday, Boing Boing posted a piece on networked tombstones; though ostensibly a morbid fad, the concept is actually quite sensitively articulated. Each headstone carries a device connected to an online memorial, containing genealogical information, a Facebook profile and a family tree. I find this to be a wonderful concept. Cemeteries are not simple places, but densely layered records of human history – overlapping stories of lives, times, places and people that are our shared heritage. To make available the stories of those lost is a fitting monument to a life and also the basis for a locative medium that speaks to us all.
A few months ago, I worked with students of IDII on digital identity, exploring the relationships between people, places and time. Many of the projects explored how we relate to places bustling with life and activity – notably cities and airports. To paraphrase James T. Kirk, if how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life then the places where our lives come to rest should be as significant a part of our digital identity as where our lives were lived.
