Ggenealogy: An R package for visualizing genealogical data

Abstract

This paper introduces ggenealogy (Rutter, Vanderplas, and Cook 2019), a developing R software package that provides tools for searching through genealogical data, generating basic statistics on their graphical structures using parent and child connections, parsing and performing calculations on branches of interest, and displaying the results. It is possible to draw the genealogy in relation to variables related to the nodes, and to determine and display the shortest path distances between the nodes. Production of pairwise distance matrices and genealogical diagrams constrained on generation are also available in the visualization toolkit. The tools are being tested on a dataset with milestone cultivars of soybean varieties (Hymowitz, Newell, and Carmer 1977) as well as on a web-based database of the academic genealogy of mathematicians (North Dakota State University and American Mathematical Society 2010). The latest stable package version is available in source and binary form on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).