Judge’s Selection: Best In Show | Kelly Goto

http://census.ancestry.com/microsite/censuscomplete.aspx
HORNALL ANDERSON DESIGN WORKS
Genealogists have always been a hardworking, tenacious bunch, poring over old microfilms in lonesome library basements to find tiny nuggets of familial truth. But with Ancestry.com—the only place on the web where one can find every publicly available U.S. Census record from 1790 to 1930—the genealogy doors have been flung open for the rest of us. This online service, part of the Generations Network, recently finished the process of digitizing the 1930 census, which offers not only a long-anticipated snapshot of Depression-era life, but more information than census records of previous years, delving deeper into the lives of both rich and poor.

To celebrate the accomplishment, Ancestry.com asked Seattle’s Hornall Anderson Design Works to create a microsite with a free two-week trial that would generate awareness of the new offering and inspire users to subscribe. “We wanted to elevate the emotional side of family genealogy,” says Jamie Monberg, interactive director at Hornall Anderson, “transforming raw numbers and data into a rich discovery experience.”

On the microsite’s home page, Hornall Anderson presents two family histories—that of Walt Disney and the lesser-known, but equally fascinating Parry family. “It’s a great example of storytelling,” says judge Kelly Goto, principal of gotomedia, San Francisco. “It demonstrates the fact that everyone has a story.” And Goto knows stories. Her mother, Delores Goto, is an historian who spearheaded the Densho Project, which aims to preserve the testimonies of Japanese-Americans unjustly incarcerated during World War II. “Obviously, this site strikes a chord with me,” says Goto.

“I understand how much work something like this entails.” Just beyond the Disney and Parry stories, users get the opportunity to explore their own family narratives, first through an interactive map of the U.S. Users enter their surnames, then slide a bar across the bottom of the screen. Shaded areas shift as the map tracks that surname’s migration—with accompanying facts from American history—across the nation over 140 years. For subscribers, the site provides more detailed information, including scanned census documents and imagery. “And that’s where the fun begins,” says Goto.

Still, she was torn. Goto describes the microsite as “an immersive, beautifully executed and interactive Flash-based site.” At the same time, she adds, those qualities do not necessarily represent the most current breakthroughs on the web. In that regard, she was drawn to Threadless.com, which was judge Joe Pemberton’s selection as Best in Show. Threadless is the T-shirt retailer that “speaks to all the new aspects of what the web can offer,” says Goto, who helped organize the Web 2.0 Expo 2007 and herself builds 2.0 web applications. “It takes a T-shirt shopping site and turns it into a community-based, forward-thinking 2.0 site. It’s like a big mash-up, but it still has a specific goal—to create and sell really cool T-shirts.”

The Ancestry.com microsite felt more like a labor of love. “It’s timeless,” she says. “It’s participatory, but not community-based, and it doesn’t outwardly project what we consider to be a Web 2.0 experience today.” So her decision didn’t come easy. “But I come from a traditional design background. And you could just tell how much time and energy was spent on making this site dynamic. The immersive storytelling is amazing, and the people who put the energy into this deserve accolades.”

Of course, if you talk to 50 people, you’ll get 150 definitions of Web 2.0. Monberg submits that the microsite is a Web 2.0 offering. Five years ago, he notes, the site’s map of the U.S. would have behaved very differently. As you moved the slider, the screen would likely freeze. An hourglass might pop up. And as you waited for the site to open a new page, any hope for maintaining suspension of disbelief would pretty much crash and burn. “We wanted to move away from the page paradigm,” says Monberg. “When you move the slider on this site, the page stays in place and the data beneath it changes.”

For Monberg, that quality is central to his definition of Web 2.0. “Web 2.0 often includes aspects of community,” he says, “but more important, next-gen sites are about behaving like applications, more like the things on your desktop, like Word or a CD-ROM. They’re fast, and they anticipate what you want to do next. They offer a pageless experience, and that’s what this site is really about.” It’s a good point, says Goto, who doesn’t disagree. She adds, “Although the microsite does utilize current technologies, it’s compiled in a way that’s timeless. Threadless defines what’s current today. But 2.0 is a term that changes often, and we never know what’s going to happen next.” For her part, Goto says she’s somewhat tired of disposable technology. “Instead of keeping up with the newest and greatest, it’s refreshing to sit down and access something that’s enduring, personal and relevant.”

Goto also appreciates this entry for a reason entirely outside the Web 2.0 discussion. It has more to do with an issue that’s dogging archivists and librarians the world over: How and in what medium can we preserve a record of history so that it will be accessible to future generations? Ancestry.com fits well within the parameters of that conversation.

“You can imagine that they started out with boxes of documents,” says Goto, “and they asked the question: How can we take this information, which is currently in the basement of some government storage facility, and present it to the public so that future generations can use it? People can now locate data on a family member from a document that might never have been unearthed otherwise. It’s amazing. And that deserves attention.”
Tiffany Meyers