Liberating Our Beautiful Trees: A Call to Arms.

Liberating Our Beautiful Trees: A Call to ArmsHilmar Lapp, Rob Guralnick, Mark Westneat 2012 iEvoBio Conference Ottawa, Canada

How this started

Visuals captivate

The story ofevolution invisual form Abby et al (2012) PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.1116871109

The story ofevolution invisual form Wiegmann B M et al. PNAS 2011;108:5690-5695

Illustrated phylogenies hard to ﬁnd

And unﬁt for reuse. ? ? ?

Limited impact tracking and credit accrual• Citation at present only through the published scholarly article.• What if • there are multiple illustrations in the article? • there isn’t a published article? • the creator of the illustration isn’t the main author of the article (or not even a co- author)?

Impact should be measurable

“But creating treeillustrations isn’t science.”• Perhaps doing it poorly indeed isn’t.• Conveying scientiﬁc conclusions and hypotheses surely is part of science.• And (re)using phylogeny illustrations for broader impacts surely is, too.• Imagine to aggregate these over the Tree of Life and see non-randomness.

If you build it, why will they come?• Most (all?) technologies we need exist already: • Online archives with citation-trackable identiﬁers: FigShare, Dryad • Formats that allow collaboration, change tracking, modularity: SVG • Social, distributed version control repositories: Github, Bitbucket, etc• Missing piece is building, prooﬁng, and promoting best practices, using existing infrastructure.

What’s in it for me?• Allow richer tracking of the various impacts of your scholarship.• A reusable tree illustration could garner more citations for the paper.• Starting from an existing illustration may be much faster than from scratch.• Fame. (Think “Tree Image of the Year”)

A Strawman Proposal: Steps we can take now• Deposit illustration ﬁgure in FigShare.• Use SVG format and SVG editor (e.g., Inkscape) for the image.• Maintain the SVG source on Github.

Article, Figure 2: “Phylogenetic trees constructed from the Adh, amd and Ddc partitions.”Stensmyr MC, Stieber R, Hansson BS(2008) The Cayman Crab Fly Revisited —Phylogeny and Biology of Drosophilaendobranchia. PLoS ONE 3(4): e1942

Metadata conventions

Metadata conventions, “machine tags”

SVG to improve reusability and collaboration• Vector graphics scale to varying sizes• Text based, hence well-suited for version control• Interactivity and animation features• Extensible, could create convention for embedding phylogeny

Social “coding” of phylogenies

“Forking” a phylogenetic illustration

Interested?• Sign up for “Liberating phylogenetic illustrations” Birds-of-a-Feather.• Blog about it - raise awareness.• Consider depositing tree illustrations in FigShare (or Dryad).• Consider a reusable format for ﬁgures of trees, and put them on Github.

http://rossmounce.co.uk	481
https://si0.twimg.com	3
https://twitter.com	2
http://core.traackr.com	1
http://translate.googleusercontent.com	1

Liberating Our Beautiful Trees: A Call to Arms.

by Hilmar Lapp on Jul 15, 2012

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