With the increase in availability of online national archives and software to manage genealogical records, genealogy studies are growing in popularity. While conducting research, genealogists communicate their findings either in written narratives or in genealogical charts. In that context, visualization methods can be very effective for promoting the understanding of the intricacies of a family tree and the relations among its individuals. Most of the software designed for genealogy provides a collection of standard charts to plot family trees, despite having limited analysis capabilities in general. In addition, most of the research in family tree visualization designs have been focused on methods to represent very large trees in a restricted space. Herein, we propose the contextual family tree, a new visualization design for family trees that represents individuals and their spouses with enhanced details about their families’ context. The design was developed through an iterative prototype-evaluation design cycle. For illustrating the potential of our new visualization design, we used contextual family trees created from publicly available genealogical data communication files, showing that the design can be useful to provide a better understanding of the data and also for validating the consistency of the genealogical data.

中文翻译：

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上下文家谱可视化设计

随着在线国家档案和管理家谱记录的软件可用性的增加，家谱研究越来越受欢迎。在进行研究时，系谱学家以书面叙述或系谱图的形式交流他们的发现。在这种情况下，可视化方法可以非常有效地促进对家谱复杂性及其个体之间关系的理解。大多数为家谱设计的软件都提供了一系列标准图表来绘制家谱，尽管通常分析能力有限。此外，家谱可视化设计的大部分研究都集中在在有限空间内表示非常大的树的方法上。在这里，我们提出了上下文家谱，一种新的家谱可视化设计，代表个人及其配偶，并增强了有关其家庭背景的详细信息。该设计是通过迭代原型评估设计周期开发的。为了说明我们新的可视化设计的潜力，我们使用了从公开可用的家谱数据通信文件中创建的上下文家谱，表明该设计有助于更好地理解数据并验证家谱数据的一致性。