Dictionary of Man: About

History of the Dictionary of Man.

Twenty years ago, Bob Geldof was sitting on a tree stump in Northern Niger with a regional governor, looking out at what Geldof described as "a moonscape". The governor told of how 300 different languages that once existed had disappeared forever in just two years during the famine. Geldof has written, "Even though I never heard those languages, I already miss them. In these ways the lights of human genius wink out." From then on he was determined to record "all those sounds, voices and jokes so they never disappear again".

In April 2007, The BBC, BBC Worldwide, Bob Geldof and award-winning series producer/director John Maguire announced the intention to collaborate on the Dictionary of Man, a unique and ambitious project that will record every human society on the planet.

A ground-breaking website is currently under construction which will offer a new and revolutionary user experience. This immense digital catalogue of all current human existence and will be an enormous resource for the exchange of ideas and information.

Goals

To create an unprecedented and comprehensive digital dictionary of every human society on the planet at the beginning of this century.
To document our varied cultures for the universal educational benefit of us all.
To utilise every medium available to us; film, TV, internet, DVD and books.
To create an unsurpassed archive of unique films, photographs and personal accounts from people of every society.
To make the Dictionary of Man content freely available in every school across the globe.
To encourage global conversation and the exchange of ideas.

How it will work

Bob Geldof has described the Dictionary of Man as the world’s family photo album. Except the centrepiece will be, not a book of fading pictures, but a massive website to which people can add new information, interact with their own distant relatives and of course, use as a unique research tool.

The website architecture will use the very latest social networking technologies in order to allow individuals across the globe to track and trace their national, clan, tribal, family and individual dispersals and reconnect to far-flung and ancient versions of their family or society group members.

Simultaneous to this vast site, Dictionary of Man crews will travel the globe to capture on film the hundreds of separate groups and thousands of variations of people that anthropologists believe to be in existence.

Who's involved

Key to the whole project is the involvement of people around the world, to gather and submit films and pictures of their lives, and their people. Bob say’s "This will be an A to Z of mankind which will catalogue the world we live in now, the people who share this planet, the way we live and the way we adapt to face common and different challenges”. With the cooperation of the great institutions of the world all extant photographs, archives and records will be included.

Anthropologists, social historians and local experts in many other disciplines will be involved as, over the years, the degrees of human difference are gradually logged.

Capturing the imagination of children and students will help involve whole communities, encourage story telling and history sharing. It will also create the foundations for preserving and passing on community history and shared experience, with the Dictionary of Man as an educational tool for the world, created by the people of the world.