For over 70 years, HRAF has served the educational community and contributed to an understanding of world cultures by assembling, indexing, and providing access to primary research materials relevant to the social sciences, as well as by stimulating and facilitating training and research in these fields. The following timeline shows some of the major highlights throughout the history of the Human Relations Area Files.
New eHRAF World Cultures application launches
August 15, 2022
The new eHRAF World Cultures application offers a fresh look and feel that combines the best aspects of our classic eHRAF interface with a host of added features and enhancements. For example, search filters have been expanded with new options, and users can customize how they would like their search results to be displayed on the page. The Search Insights panel offers additional options for visualizing and drilling down through results sets. An exciting new development for researchers is the eHRAF Notebook, which allows paragraph search results to be saved, organized, annotated, and shared. In addition to the sleek new appearance, users benefit from many performance upgrades enabling faster searching and more relevant paragraph results.
Read moreTeaching eHRAF revamped
August 20, 2017
Teaching eHRAF, the collection of companion teaching exercises for eHRAF World Cultures, eHRAF Archaeology and Explaining Human Culture, got a new look and feel in August 2017.
Read moreHRAF expands collaboration with D-PLACE
July 1, 2016
D-PLACE is an expandable and open-access database that brings together a dispersed corpus of information on the geography, language, culture, and environment of over 1400 human societies. In July 2016, it became easier than ever to follow links from the coded data in D-PLACE directly into the eHRAF World Cultures.
Read moreBeta development begins on eHRAF World Cultures
July 1, 2016
HRAF IT began developing a new version of our flagship eHRAF World Cultures application in 2016. By 2020, the new application would be in the final stages of beta testing, with an anticipated launch date of 2022. At the heart of the new application design, headed by HRAF Software Engineer Matthew Roth, is a much-anticipated Notebook feature to allow users to save, share, and annotate search results. The new application will also receive a number of performance upgrades enabling faster searching and more relevant results.
Read moreExplaining Human Culture
June 24, 2016
In the summer of 2016, HRAF launched Explaining Human Culture, an open access database containing information on over 1,000 cross-cultural studies spanning more than 100 years. EHC provides a searchable way for researchers to find out what we have learned from previous cross-cultural research about cultural universals and differences.
Read moreIntroducing Cross-Cultural Research
June 23, 2016
In 2016, HRAF diversified its product offerings with new open-access resources for learning and teaching. Introducing Cross-Cultural Research is a visual online course on the fundamentals of cross-cultural research produced by Carol Ember, HRAF President.
Read moreCitations and Permalinks added to eHRAF
May 14, 2015
In 2015, quick and easy citations and document permalinks were added to the eHRAF databases, making saving and sharing documents and search results a snap.
Read moreNew HRAF homepage launches
March 11, 2014
The Human Relations Area Files homepage was re-launched with a fresh new look and design. The new URL, hraf.yale.edu, is now home to the eHRAF Highlights anthropology blog, user guides, teaching exercises and pages of information about cross-cultural research. It has quickly become an indispensable companion to the eHRAF databases.
Read moreNew eHRAF World Cultures application goes live
July 1, 2013
This updated version of eHRAF World Cultures was designed and built in-house by developers at HRAF. Software engineers Doug Black and Matthew Roth worked to improve the front end with more user-friendly revisions, creating the familiar interface that users got to know and love for the next decade until the latest launch in 2022.
Read moreNew eHRAF World Cultures application online
February 1, 2008
On February 1, 2008, HRAF began hosting its own application, re-titled eHRAF World Cultures.
Read moreeHRAF Archaeology goes online
January 1, 1999
eHRAF Archaeology became HRAF’s second electronic database. It has been building solely in electronic format since 1999. Expanding annually, this database covers major archaeological traditions and many more sub-traditions and sites around the world. Learn more.
Read moreFirst online eHRAF Collection of Ethnography opens
January 1, 1997
The first online version of the eHRAF Collection of Ethnography was available in 1997 and was hosted by the Digital Library Production Service at the University of Michigan.
Read moreCross-cultural CDs available
September 1, 1993
In 1993, the first installment of the full-text HRAF Collection of Ethnography on CD-ROM (eHRAF) was issued to members. The Cross-Cultural CDs provided researchers with ten collections on such topics as old age, marriage, religion, and human sexuality, excerpted from HRAF’s Sixty Culture Probability Sample Files (PSF). The CDs were discontinued in 2001.
Read moreMicrofiche no longer produced
January 1, 1993
The HRAF Collection of Ethnography was originally distributed as paper files. From the early 1960s until 1994, most members received their annual installments on microfiche.
Read moreHRAF goes electronic
September 9, 1980
In the 1980s, HRAF began developing an electronic publishing program with the intention of distributing the Collection of Ethnography exclusively through electronic means.
Read moreHRAF Files distributed in microfiche
January 1, 1958
Wider distribution of the HRAF Collection of Ethnography was facilitated in 1958 with the development of the HRAF Microfiche Files.
Read moreHRAF Collection of Ethnography paper files released
June 1, 1949
From 1949 to 1958, the HRAF Collection of Ethnography was produced and distributed as paper files: source materials were manually reproduced on 5″ x 8″ paper slips called File pages, and then indexed by subject (OCM) category and filed by culture.
Read moreHRAF founded
May 7, 1949
Human Relations Area Files, Inc. has been a financially autonomous research agency based at Yale University since 1949. On February 26, 1949, delegates from Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Washington, and Yale University met in New Haven, Connecticut to pledge their membership in a new nonprofit research consortium to be based at Yale. On May 7, 1949, the HRAF consortium was formally established.
Read moreResearchers begin work on Cross-Cultural Survey
January 1, 1935
In 1935, a small group of researchers at the interdisciplinary Institute of Human Relations, Yale University, under the direction of the Institute’s Director, Mark A. May, and Professor George Peter Murdock, began to design a system that would allow the rapid retrieval of information on a broad range of societies. The resulting Cross-Cultural Survey would become the foundation for the HRAF Collection of Ethnography.
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