Welcome to the Kinbank data repository!

Human kinship organization is both remarkably diverse and strikingly organized. Kinship terminology is the structured vocabulary used to classify, refer to, and address relatives and family. Diversity in kinship terminology has been analyzed by anthropologists for over 150 years, although recurrent patterning across cultures remains incompletely explained. Despite the wealth of kinship data in the anthropological record, comparative studies of kinship terminology are hindered by data accessibility.

Kinbank, a new database of 210,903 kinterms from a global sample of 1,229 spoken languages, looks to solve that problem. Using open-access and transparent data provenance, Kinbank offers an extensible resource for kinship terminology, enabling researchers to explore the rich diversity of human family organization and to test longstanding hypotheses about the origins and drivers of recurrent patterns.

Interact with the data at: www.kinbank.net

This repository is the amalgamation of work from the University of Bristol, The Australian National University, the University of Helsinki, and the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Each university runs its own subproject, which can be seen in the links below:

• Varikin
• Parabank
• Kinura
• MPEGKin

Citation

If you are using the Kinbank dataset, or referring to the ideas discussed in the paper, please cite this paper:

Passmore, S., Barth, W., Greenhill, S. J., Quinn, K., Sheard, C., Argyriou, P., Birchall, J., Bowern, C., Calladine, J., Deb, A., Diederen, A., Metsäranta, N. P., Araujo, L. H., Schembri, R., Hickey-Hall, J., Honkola, T., Mitchell, A., Poole, L., Rácz, P. M., … Jordan, F. M. (2023). Kinbank: A global database of kinship terminology. PLOS ONE, 18(5), e0283218. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283218

If you are only using a particular subset of the data, please cite that subset specifically. The citations for each data subset are available on their respective github repositories, or in the supplementary material of the paper.

Adding data

Since this dataset is an amalgamation of four different datasets, it is not appropriate to add new data to this repository. It will be overwritten when the dataset is regenerated.

If you are already affiliated with one of these datasets, contact the group leader to ask about how to add new data. If you are not affiliated with any of the existing projects, create an issue in this repository and the Kinbank team will contact you as soon as possible.