ggenealogy

Generate on-the-fly visualizations of genealogical data

Summary:

Re-factor the phyViz package into a new package called ggenealogy, which provides additional methods to visualize the ancestors and descendants of a given line or variety.

Description:

• Draw interactive genealogy trees from database of known lineage.
• Select generation number of ancestors and descendants to show around a given variety.
• Show shortest path between two given varieties, and superimpose over full lineage structure.
• Organize nodes horizontally by time of emergence, and vertically by a given additional variable.
• Obtain graph theory measures of the full lineage structure.
• Produce color matrix plots of variables between a subset of varieties.
• Ensure plotting tools can be used for both exploratory data analysis and publication purposes.

> library(devtools)
> install_github("phyViz", "dicook")

Related work:

• pedigree
• pedigreemm
• kinship2

Potential tasks:

• Incorporate Shiny to allow users to examine genealogy visualization tools in a more interactive way
• Test the package on multiple toy datasets
  • Soybean parent-child relationships
  • Barley parent-child relationships
  • Mathematics Genealogy Project (http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/)
• Enhance the flexibility of potential data input types
  • Currently-required input format is a data frame of parent-child relationships
  • Possible input types include Purdy Notation System

Skills required:

Knowledge of genealogical data structures, igraph, ggplot2, shiny, and devtools.

Test:

Write R code that reads in this data, and can calculate the number of steps, could be forward to descendants or backwards to ancestors, to get from one line/variety to another. Test it out by reporting the number of steps between Clark and Calland.

Mentor:

Di Cook ([@](mailto:visnut {at} gmail {dot} com)) and Susan Vanderplas ([@](mailto:srvanderplas {at} gmail {dot} com)) as backup mentor

Reference:

• A student paper competition piece written about the phyViz package.