Cultural heritage

The mission statement in our Corporate documents has this:

(a) to establish and to maintain a persistent presence in order to honor the accomplishments of the Cape Ann party (1623/24)2 lead by Thomas Gardner; to promote, and to sponsor, scholarly research of a cultural, biographical, historical and genealogical nature, with an emphasis on, but not limited to, the origins and the lives of New England immigrants; to provide means for, and to foster, discussion, and dissemination of, information on those themes; to publish materials periodically and as necessary;

Notice that 'cultural' is first; also, this was written in 2014. That was due to being aware of trends that accelerated with the advent of the mobile devices around 2008. But, of late, we see even more discussion about the computer's impact on us.

In essence, people and computers go together. In the future, we won't have one without the other, despite all of the gloom that we see pertaining to robots taking over. In programming, there is a joke about whether a bug is really an error or whether it is a feature. If it is the former, it may be fixable. Trying to fix might introduce more errors. Finding a feature, though, might be the start of a learning something new.

AI, with its machine learning, is following that path. Right now, we're at a state where solutions, and discoveries, seem opaquely configured. Imponderable.

But, we see that knowing about people is going to help which implies that efforts like history and genealogy will have an impact. That is, more than mere presentation of tools for people to use when modeling the relationships of their ancestors.

Going to the basics, we can look at a couple of academic views: The Ethics of Cultural Heritage; Editorial for Inaugural Issue of JOCCH. The first looks at definitions and some issues in a context that is becoming more visible. The latter is an example of an effort to study related matters. They got started one year before our onset.

Speaking of which. We were mainly filling in a hundred-year gap since the work of Dr. Frank. Too, the notion was to use technology. The tie-in to the 'American Dream' didn't take long to determine with the first action of looking at D.A.R. due to its visibility in the matter.

But, the theme of retelling history has really gone viral of late. There are lots of examples, some of which we have linked to from this blog.

Remarks: Modified: 11/07/2019

11/07/2019 --