Vision statement: Human Sustainabilities and Societies Project

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Contents 1 Introduction 2 World Vision, Prevision and Provision: calling for Reinventing our world 3 The research problems 4 Envision a worldwide project 5 some initial examples of people that are or might be engaged 6 Initial steps that might be taken

[edit] Introduction

The Human Societies Project contains some ideas of Scott D. White as to how to enlarge the collaborative projects that Douglas R. White began with the SCCS, the World Cultures eJournal, and the Kinship, Class, and Communities Kinship computing project. He provides three examples of on-line database ontology (i.e., freebase), a more conventional on-line database (i.e., DabbleDb, and an open source network (i.e., Jung - Java Universal Networks and Graphs).

[edit] World Vision, Prevision and Provision: calling for Reinventing our world

Our world is going through a series of punctuated successions, massive collapses of the ways things are done, like the rapid demise of the institutions of the Wall Street financial firms once they became unregulated. A number of elements might be connected given that our world will need to be reinvented in the ways that we do things: artistic ecological reinvisioning as a result of dialogues among professions and sites, methods of envisioning our changing world as is being done at ESRI for example, with an evolving tool-set, presenting educational syntheses about what the sciences tell us about the processes of our planetary evolution, and the use of our new tool-sets and mind-sets to explore multiple images of our futures in terms of planetary interdependencies, interactions, and emergent potentials for using the punctuated successions of problems that we know we must face in a positive way for all peoples and all sustainable ecologies. This is an open project and we invite all who can contribute skills, tools, imagination and effort toward positive solutions to participate.

• Visualization the actual world in the mode of Google maps e.g., using ArcExplorer
• The revisioning in Ecological Art of grounded sites as in Green Heart Vision] (e.g., revisioning Holland)
• Reinvisioning the future WITH ArcExplorer
• The Evolutionary processes (on-line Museum) using all the technologies

Sample databases contributed for cultural and ecologies studies (as yet very partial, but a start)

1. Ethnographic Database Project
2. Ethnographic Atlas -- Wikipedia:Ethnographic Atlas
3. SCCS -- Wikipedia:Standard Cross-Cultural Sample
4. Ecological databases

[edit] The research problems

• The next 500 years
• The previous 500 years
• The 500 years 900-1500

[edit] Envision a worldwide project

1. All mappable in Google earth, maps, etc.
2. All retrievable for data analysis
3. All cross-referenced, geocoded, timw coded
4. As applied to:
5. All the coded ethnographic and historical databases
6. All the textual ethnographic and historical databases
7. All the language phylogeny
8. All the Y chromosome phylogeny
9. All the mitochondrial phylogeny
10. All the ethnographic network data, e.g., genealogical
11. All the population data, rural, towns, cities
12. All the trade route/sea route data
13. All the commodity, bullion trading and monetary flow data
14. All the conflict data
15. All the political boundaries and administrative units data

...insofar are people are free to contribute and others are free to implement open source software to integrate these databases

[edit] some initial examples of people that are or might be engaged

Peter Turchin 2008 Arise Cliodynamics. Nature 454: 34-35

Chris Chase-Dunn Upsweep Inventory

Joseph Henrich

Jeroen Bruggeman

Anthon Eff & Network autocorrelation

Michael D. Fischer

Andrey Korotayev

Nicolay N. Kradin http://www.openhistory.net/

Douglas R. White - SCCS & Network datasets

Duran Bell - SCCS marriage payments codes

Padhraic Smyth

Scott D. White

George Modelski

William R. Thompson

Laura Fortunato

Ruth Mace

William W. Dressler

Kathy Oths

Laurent Tambayong

[edit] Initial steps that might be taken

A good systems/database integrator might take a single Spss/Excel/SAS/dta file containing all 2,000 variables for the SCCS database and design an interface for Freebase or some other on-line integrator, the interface design might include

1. mapping of variables in Google map protocols
2. data transformation and analysis
3. polygon construction for regions resulting from analyses
4. regression analysis with autocorrelation effects, tests and error terms
5. networks superimposed on the map
6. integration of other data
7. etc
8. etc (Scott might specify ...)

And then the problem is how to integrate different datasets...