Potentially bad news for history and genealogy

Tara Calishain, indefatigable creator and maintainer of ResearchBuzz, reports:

BetaNews: Google loses big ‘right to be forgotten’ case — and it could set an important precedent. “A businessman with an historic criminal conviction has won his case against Google in a ‘right to be forgotten’ lawsuit seeking to remove information about his conviction from search results. The case, heard today in London, could set a precedent and lead to a series of similar cases from other people with spent convictions. The anonymous businessman — known only as NT2 — has a conviction for conspiracy to intercept communications from more than a decade ago and spent six months in prison for the crime.”

I totally recommend that you subscribe, even if (like me) you don't have time to read it all. It's free.

Last year in a luncheon talk I speculated on what genealogy might be like in 2117. It was mostly not a very pretty picture, and so far -- just one year in! -- the following piece of that talk seems to be on target. I suggested that . . .

Profit-driven corporations will fight the good fight against those who claim a “right to be forgotten.” Perhaps the decisive court case will involve Googlecestry vs. the North American Union, when those who advocate such a right to be forgotten will sue to have their role in that fight itself forgotten.

If that case is resolved wrongly, then genealogy could even become an illegal conspiracy. The use of cursive writing could become a code furthering said conspiracy. Somewhere deep in the suburban slums, history books would be furtively traded for images of the “forgotten” presidents. I’m still just enough of a 20^th-century person to think that this might not happen.

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Methodology Monday with Robots

From Mashable (hat tip to Tara Calishain at ResearchBuzz):

"Quarterly corporate earnings reports from the AP will soon be produced through a computer program that is able to take the key numbers from companies' results to create a story of 150 to 300 words, the media company announced in a blog post. . . . The AP isn't the only organization using journobots. The New York Times uses automation for some of its wedding announcements, while Automated Insights also provides recaps for fantasy football matchups. . . . the AP is looking at using automation on 'results stories for lower-audience sports.'"

(I omit mention of TV announcers as they may well already be robots, albeit rather excitable ones.)

The same thing is happening to genealogy, bit by bit, although not in exactly the same ways.

Look for information and a robot may offer you "hints." Some are wildly wrong, some may be helpful.

Enter the resulting data and your genealogy program will produce a "report." Granted, it reads like it was written by robots, but they are getting smarter all the time. And of course the report in any case is only as good as the data on which it is based.

Robots are getting better at distinguishing kinds of text -- for instance, in searching city directories, knowing enough to distinguish the "Jones" in "Ralph Jones" from the "Jones" in "Jones Street." They may be soon reading handwriting, a function that once required a human being, often an astute one.

Interestingly, many stages of automation involve a certain sacrifice of quality, much as cell phones give up in sound quality some of what they gain in portability. Robots make mistakes in indexing that humans would never make. We tolerate these foibles because on balance the robots usually make our lives easier, but the core of genealogy is not something that can be averaged out -- it's either the way things were back then, or it's not.

What's my point? Not to complain. It's just this: Within some lifetimes now begun, advanced genealogy will be the only genealogy requiring human involvement:

• looking in physical places where robots don't know and can't go, either because the materials aren't digitized or because no one thought of "that stuff" as being genealogically relevant;
• distinguishing bogus robotic "hints" from useful ones, and otherwise fixing robotic errors in their output;
• resolving conflicting evidence;
• analyzing and correlating complex collections of evidence properly; and
• writing a coherent and convincing proof argument.

 Have a nice century.

"The Associated Press Now Automates Earnings Stories, No Humans Needed," Mashable (http://mashable.com/2014/06/30/the-associated-press-turns-to-computer-automation-for-corporate-earnings-stories : viewed 1 July 2014).

Photo credit: Neil Milne's photostream, "Cheery Robot Lazer Attack Nail Art" (https://www.flickr.com/photos/borispumps/7184818385 : viewed 1 July 2014), per Creative Commons.

 

Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday with Robots," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 7 July 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]