Charleen Mullenweg’s field notes from the first RootsTech conference capture genealogy at a moment of rapid technological change. From portable scanners and laptops to new storage options and research tools, the conference floor made visible how dramatically family-history practice was shifting. Her account is valuable not just as a list of gadgets, but as evidence of genealogy becoming a technology-driven field while still remaining fundamentally concerned with people, evidence, memory, and connection.
Tag Archives: Conferences & Events
Rootstech Family History & Technology Conference – Day 1
Reporting from the inaugural RootsTech conference, Charleen Mullenweg encounters a gathering built explicitly around the convergence of genealogy and technology. Her observations capture both the enthusiasm and the learning curve of a field adapting to new digital research methods, online communities, and emerging tools. The piece documents a moment when family history was moving decisively beyond archives and desktop software toward a more connected ecosystem of platforms, devices, institutions, and individual researchers.
How to promote your heritage event using the web
This past week, I attended WordCamp Dallas, a meeting of bloggers and web professionals who are using the WordPress platform. WordCamp was phenomenal both in terms of the information delivered and the wonderful people who were there. Seeing all the fabulous strategies used to make this event happen on a registration fee of just $30 per person, it got me to thinking, how could these strategies be applied to make heritage events more accessible and successful? <br />
La. Folklore Society Presentation: Bringing Communities Together
I delivered this presentation today at the Louisiana Folklore Society Conference in Leesville, La. It explains the principles of social media using a Ning site I put together for my hometown: The Natchitoches Preservation Network.
Boag takes an already great conference FOrWarD
Chairing a tech conference and maintaining the eccentric air your audience of artsy-techie designers expects would seem to be mutually exclusive goals. Not for Paul Boag, the brilliant designer and podcaster, whose on-stage persona hovers somewhere between Gilbert Gottfried and Steve Coogan in Dr. Terrible’s…
FOWD: An unconventional way to present a concept
I’ve never consciously thought during a presentation “I want to speak like that person.” But such was the case with Litmus‘ Paul Farnell’s presentation on unconventional ways to promote your site. What was more unconventional was his “every guy” conversational style of presenting. He didn’t…
FOWD: Bad, Burka, Bad!
Image via CrunchBase So Louisianian‘s live in trailers and marry their cousins, eh? Well, maybe we do. But my brother-in-law and I are coming to Pownce your San Francisco @$$ anyway. 😉 https://vimeo.com/932296 Archive note — September 2026: Pownce, the microblogging service referenced in this…
FOWD: Holy Cheesophile! A presentation that’s practical
For a while now, I’ve been trying to adopt the Beyond Bullet Points presentation style outlined in Cliff Atkinson’s book of the same name. Some folks call it the Web 2.0 style as well. It focuses on gaining audience buy-in by connecting them to the…
FOWD: This part of the program made me want a drink too
This brief field note from Future of Web Design captures the playful culture of an early web-design conference through a live Photoshop face-off. It is less an argument than an artifact of immersion: a communicator and emerging digital practitioner observing the rituals, personalities, and creative energy of a field still defining itself. Its value in the archive is precisely that immediacy—the texture of learning by entering a new professional culture in real time.
FOWD: Print is the New Web
A Future of Web Design session prompts a reconsideration of the supposed divide between print and web. By examining how composition, typography, and visual structure could move between media, the piece begins from design but lands on a broader idea: digital work improves when it learns from established forms rather than assuming every new medium requires a complete break with the past. It is an early example of looking for continuity across technological change.