Lightning talk I gave at the 2012 iEvoBio conference in Ottawa, Canada. The abstract is can be found here: http://ievobio.org/ocs2/index.php/ievobio/2012/paper/view/39/26

1. Liberating Our
Beautiful Trees: A
Call to Arms
Hilmar Lapp, Rob Guralnick, Mark Westneat
2012 iEvoBio Conference
Ottawa, Canada

2. How this started

3. Visuals captivate

4. The story of
evolution in
visual form
Abby et al (2012) PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.1116871109

5. The story of
evolution in
visual form
Wiegmann B M et al. PNAS 2011;108:5690-5695

6. Illustrated phylogenies hard to find

7. And unfit for
reuse.
?
?
?

8. 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)?

9. Impact should be measurable

10. “But creating tree
illustrations 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.

11. 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.

12. 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”)

13. 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.

15. 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 Drosophila
endobranchia. PLoS ONE 3(4): e1942

16. Metadata conventions

17. Metadata conventions,
“machine tags”

18. 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

19. Social “coding” of phylogenies

20. “Forking” a phylogenetic illustration

21. 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.