Project Name: Hunter-Gatherer Anthropological Database

Sponsor:
Dr. Gary Seaman (email: seaman@rcf-cf.usc.edu; tel: 213-740-1906)
Dr. Christopher Boehm (email: cboehm1@msn.com; tel: 505-992-1640)

Partners:
None

Background:
For three years the Jane Goodall Research Center has been processing data for an interactive database on hunter-gatherer social behavior, a database which is essential to developing evolutionary theories about the origin and development of human behaviors such as morality, social control, conflict resolution, cooperation, and inter-group conflict.

At present, we have processed three dozen hunting societies, which means scanning ethnographic field descriptions of the behaviors of each society and then coding relevant passages according to their content, which ranges from conflict and conflict management details to details of cooperation, social deviance, moral sanctioning, social ideology, group leadership, political power, and altruistic behaviors. There are a total of 242 coding categories at present, but we wish to design the database so that this number of coding categories could be increased, eventually, to several thousand.

We now have a grant for coding an additional 130 societies of the same type, but no funding for development of the database, per se. At present we have applied the code to scanned texts for three dozen societies, and we will be increasing the overall materials by five-fold over the coming two years. The result will be a database having sizable storage requirements. We also intend to integrate pictures of hunter-gatherers into the database, which will add substantially to storage requirements.

Problem:
What we need is to adapt a Google-type search engine for the specialized needs of scholars in evolutionary biology, psychology, and anthropology who will use this database when it is eventually made public. The search engine will have to be able to handle several thousand coding categories, and it will need to do specialized searches involving combinations of categories. It also will need to be searchable either for full texts falling under a given code, or brief summaries of these texts, or both together, and it also will need to be searchable with or without pictures.

Constraints:

Desired Deliverables:
We need minimally a working prototype of the database search engine that we can load data into and test for searching capacity. What we actually need is the search engine, ready to go.