Tuesday 28 August 2012

(2) Why do this project?

The goals of the FASCONN project are to provide a sound basis for various collaborative academic research projects concerning the genealogy and family history of large groups of individuals with a particular focus on human health and survival. Two distinct populations will form the research domains for this software development:

  1. An existing Koori Health Research Database covering over 10,00 indigenous people and their descendants who lived in Victoria and NSW in the 19th and 20th Century, with a particular focus on recording and understanding health outcomes e.g. causes of death. 
  2. Building on the Founders and Survivors project, a database of over 15,000 Tasmanian born WWI AIF enlistees who are descendant from convicts transported to Tasmania in the 19th Century, with a particular focus on understanding the historical determinants of responses to stress.
A well documented open-source web-based multiple user database application designed to address the general area of large-scale historical demography has many benefits. It will enable many collaborators, starting from scratch, to formerly record and transcribe their evidence and sources, and to assert events, multiple persons, and human relationships with formal citations from those sources. This will enable family and social historians to focus on collecting or linking to, and interpreting, the relevant historical sources - the core of their research - efficiently and effectively. They will no longer need to risk being locked into single-user desktop bound proprietary software oriented to a single individuals family tree, nor be distracted by having to build their own technological solutions to what is a common problem: analysing the experiences of groups of people, the events in place and time which form their life histories, and the inter-generational relationships between them. They will be in control of their own research data and will be able to extend their databases and share data with other researchers over a long period of time.

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