In my last blog post I introduced Germany’s largest genealogical association “Verein für Computergenealogie” and itscrowd-sourcing platform DES. The DES has an easy-to-use browser-based interface that heavily contributed to the motivation of the volunteers. We used the DES to realize our biggestsingle-source project so far, the in-depth-indexing of theGerman WW1 casualty lists. This source comprises 31,000 newspaper-format pages displaying more than 8.5 million entries. With the help of approx. 700 volunteers we finished this enormous task within 32 months—on time for the WW1 centenary in August 2014. The completion sent positive waves throughout German media. Now, we also use the DES for several other sources, such as other casualty lists, historic city directories, civil registry records, church records, and many more. Association for computer genealogy – short: CompGen #2 weiterlesen →
Since March 2015 the “Verein für Computergenealogie” (association for computer genealogy – or short CompGen) is a member of ICARUS. In this article I would like to introduce the association and some of its projects.
With more than 3,700 members CompGen is the largest genealogical association in Germany. It was founded in 1989 and quickly gained popularity (and members) by taking chances on a then young technology, the internet. CompGen is a non-profit organization and is completely funded by member fees. As an advocate for open-access data, CompGen surely had a share in the fact that the genealogical market in Germany is different than in other countries. Under our ‘brand’ genealogy.net we offer a variety of information infrastructure. The “Verein für Computergenealogie” – association for computer genealogy – short: CompGen weiterlesen →
Dr. Jesper Zedlitz is a Senior Software Engineer and in his free time a board member of the Computer Genealogy Association, where he is responsible for all topics related to computer science.
He studied computer science in Kiel until 2005. This was followed by a number of positions, both non-university and at the university, among others at a large German Internet provider and the “ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics”. Since completing his doctorate in
2013 until the beginning of 2018, he has been a research associate at the Communication Systems Group at the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Kiel. His main research topics were conceptual modeling, Digital Humanities and Citizen Science. He has participated in numerous interdisciplinary projects with historians, linguists and musicologists. Since the beginning of 2018 he is working as Senior Software Engineer for a Hamburg based software company. Jesper Zedlitz weiterlesen →
Jesper Zedlitz (German Society for Computer Genealogy, DE)
Studied Computer Science at the University of Kiel and received PhD in 2013. Vice President of the biggest German genealogy association, the Society for Computer Scientists with more than 3600 members. Research focus on semantic web technologies, modelling of historic facts, data normalization, development of methods to effectively move from printed sources to high quality Linked Data through for example crowd sourcing.
The common weblog of the International Centre for Archival Research (ICARUS) and The European Branch of the International Council on Archives (EURBICA)
