A Graphical Web Application Showing Ruling Families of the World

With a poster session I would like to introduce a new graphical method for presenting the history of kingdoms and dukedoms and the family relations among them.  The conventional way of graphically representing a dynasty is, of course, a family tree.  But the tree diagram has one serious defect:  only one family can be clearly displayed at a time.  It is visually impossible to show on a single chart many families, especially royal or noble families, over the course of several generations, with all the marriage connections between them.  My graphical method divides the subject by generation, rather than family, so that various families can be shown at once in a manner that is both clear and well-suited for internet display.  The chief advantage of the method is that it allows the viewer to see at a glance the “big picture” of the relations among the leading dynasties of each generation.

My intended audience is not limited to high school students who would rather click at websites than read more than a few sentences.  Rather, my hope is that this web application will be of great interest to students of European and Middle Eastern history at all levels.   The scope of the chart is broad, from late Roman times to the present, and includes not only kings and dukes, for whom the succession of a family member is expected, but also bishops and ministers, whose offices, though elective, were in practice often granted to kinsmen.  The chart conforms to a high standard of source documentation; references to sources appear with a simple mouse-over.

The chart helps address a general problem with the internet:  A lack of alternatives to text search.  Presently, there is a great volume of writing in the social sciences available on the web, but very few ways to move about it.  A web search on the name of any person of historical interest will generate a list of sites, each of which has very much the appearance of an article in a printed encyclopedia:  There is a picture, a brief biography, and notes on sources and further reading.  This is all fine for those who know from the start exactly whom they want to read about, but the web encyclopedias lack an effective way to “zoom out” and study a subject more broadly.  The web encyclopedias provide links to other articles, but there is no way to anticipate what the other articles link to. I believe my graphical presentation of ruling families can provide a badly-needed visual alternative to the present read-text-click-link method of internet learning.    

The centerpiece of my poster presentation will be a laptop computer with the web family chart installed that will allow my guests to give it a “test drive.”  Behind the computer, I will post images from the chart to illustrate how historical events, such as alliances and conquests, can be visualized with the chart’s aid.  I will also prepare an explanatory pamphlet, but I am not selling a product at this stage.