FactGrid:The Global Genealogy of Lodges

Masonic chart, 1846

The aim: To have a Genealogy of all the lodges that ever existed. When die they start? How were they affiliated? If we had the framework we could think of gathering membership information and understand the development of the whole phenomenon.

Some things The problem poses a load of problems.

Who would join this project to give it the momentum it would require?

This would be a project to run with a team of at least 10 people. One would love to people on board:

• people with connections who can address other lodges as partners.
• programmers who know how will be able to do mass inputs of data and who could create an interface that would work on masonic websites.
• people with the necessary historical knowledge to understand what such a database should be able to tell us - we need the questions to do the interesting visualisations of data.

Where would we get the data to start with?

Creating masses of data-objects by hand is not much fun. One would love to run a major list input with basic data such as names, locations, internal identifiers, basic dates.

FactGrid will get the GND data in the course of this year. We do presently list some 90 lodges - we will jump to about 1000 with basic information, but the GND data sets might not be the sets to start with.

What would one like to know about Lodges

• Mother lodge
• Ritual (do they change?)
• Names (some lodges change their names every couple of years)
• Members (we can actually run SPARQL queries for the existing 90 lodges in FactGrid for first 18th-century results but the are not yet satisfying). The final project should tell us something about the connections of members, about their flow and about other affiliations they had. (Think of the Illuminati and how they pervaded and infiltrated lodges...)

The Genealogy

We should have an idea of the possible connections two lodges can have in order to give a good data model that will present nice trees of historical connections.