Phylo lets you do contextual research in philosophy. This approach goes beyond keywords and cross-referencing to capture how an idea arose in the literature, how it’s connected to other ideas, which other sources might prove relevant for research. Using Phylo, you can study philosophical ideas, along with the people and places behind them. The dataset can also be used to study the professional development of the discipline.

Come on, phylosophers are famous for inventing new terms. But seriously, we wanted to evoke associations of groups, origins, and taxonomies, so we ran with the root term phylo-.

Planning for Phylo started in 2006 with two parts of the project: data collection and integration and visual interface development. During summer 2007, we collected information on over 4,000 dissertations and 3,000 faculty appointments at 18 schools. Since then, we’ve been adding smaller updates and trying to integrate our data with other kinds of information, especially publication metadata sources and keyword taxonomies. We drafted our first displays in fall 2006, revised them throughout the year, and we stated coding web versions in fall 2007. A beta version of the site was launched in fall 2008, and we’ve been adding data and developing new features since then. You can find more details in the "Documents" and "Technologies" sections of our About page.

Yes and no. Let’s talk in terms of a few different kinds of projects.

• There have been academic family trees on the web since the Mathematics Genealogy Project was launched in 1997. Josh Dever and David Chalmers have both compiled similar advisor–student data in philosophy. There are also a handful of departmental trees out there (none in philosophy, as far as we know), and many narrative departmental histories.
• There have been lots of visualization projects for different data sets across the web. Visual Thesaurus is a great example, and many more are listed at visualcomplexity.com. Also of note is Indiana University’s Info Viz Lab.
• There are major social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace that store contact information and facilitate communication—and a number of studies about them underway at major universities. Using print technologies, the American Philosophy Association and Philosophy Documentation Center have been publishing directories of philosophers and departments for decades.
• And obviously there are search indexes and sites like WorldCat, Google Scholar, and The Philosopher’s Index. Quite recently, some of these have added citation indexes as well, allowing for some estimate of a publication’s significance. Scopus has even attempted visual displays of this information.

But as far as we know, there is nothing out there like Phylo that combines aspects of all these technologies into a single research tool.

Yes, actually…on Facebook, though. But we take your point that Phylo has some similarities with social networking sites. The major difference is that Phylo wasn’t built to facilitate communication. Phylo’s primary goal is to act as a historical catalog of people, places, and publications in philosophy, up to and including the present.

Yes please. We’ve received some small grants to develop smaller parts of Phylo. You can find all the details in the "Acknowledgments" section of our About page. If you’re aware of potential funding sources, please let us know at phylo@phylo.info.

Hopefully soon. We’re planning to export the entire site (without data on philosophers) as a free drupal module for any discipline. Once it’s ready, you’ll be able to add data, link up to sources in your discipline, and see the same visualizations that appear on Phylo. If you’d like to talk more about a spin-offs, contact us as phylo@phylo.info.

Yes. Even if you’re working on contemporary problems, you may want to see how many sources have been written on your topic or which ideas it’s most associated with. And once you poke around the site a bit, you may find new sources that didn’t turn up in other search tools. If you make some good discoveries, be sure to let us know in the Research section of Phylo Forum.

Yes. In fact, Phylo will probably be more useful to you than other search tools. It’s natural for us to keep track of people we know, where they are, what they’re doing, and how they’re connected. This is exactly how Phylo presents ideas, arguments, and positions in the history of philosophy. Phylo will help put philosophical ideas in context and allow you to interact with them in intuitive ways.

Any personal information you provide during account creation will be kept private, unless you explicitly tell the system to display it on the site. Any professional or publication information contained in public documents or submitted by users is visible on the site. For more information, see our Privacy Policy.

Yes, as long as you’ve (a) received a doctoral degree in philosophy, (b) taught in a philosophy department, and/or (c) published an article in a philosophical journal or a book included in PhilPapers or categorized under the Library of Congress subject heading ‘Philosophy’.

Phylo explores formalized connections among professional academic philosophers. For instance, our database can tell you who someone's dissertation advisor was or whether they were on the faculty in a particular university at the same time as someone else.

Currently, a person must meet at least one of the following conditions in order to be included in our database:

• The person has held a full-time or part-time appointment in a philosophy department at an accredited institution of higher education.
• The person has earned a doctorate from a philosophy department at an accredited institution of higher education.
• The person has published at least one work that is included in PhilPapers.
• The person has published as least one work categorized as "Philosophy" by the United States Library of Congress.
• The person is Socrates.

Feel free to add anyone who meets at least one of the above criteria, but please do not add anyone who does not meet any of them.

We recognize that this excludes a large number of people who might qualify as philosophers. This is not because we think that only people who meet these criteria are "real" philosophers. It's because the purpose of Phylo is to explore the connections among the kind of people who typically do meet these criteria.

Phylo depends on users to keep its database growing and up-to-date. To add or edit data, you'll need to log in or create a free account. (Keeping track of who submits what helps us ensure data integrity.)

Please include sources for your data whenever possible. This will help adjudicate disputes about data integrity.

Editing existing data. If you see information on the site that is incorrect or incomplete, please correct or expand on it. You can edit existing information by clicking on the ⊕ icons next to editable data.

Adding new degrees or appointments to an existing person. If you want to add a new degree or appointment to an existing person in the database, use the search box near the top left corner of the screen to access that person's existing data. Then, click the 'Add new degree' or 'Add new appointment' button below the list of their other degrees and appointments. You can add new degrees and appointments even if you don't know all of the relevant information.

Adding a new thesis or advisor to a person's degree. If you want to add information about someone's thesis or advisor, you'll need to create a degree for that person first. Once you've done that, you'll see 'No thesis found' under the new degree. Click the ⊕ icon next to 'No thesis found' and enter the new information. You don't need to know all of the relevant information. In fact, you can even add an advisor without knowing the title of the thesis.

Adding a new person or institution. Our database is still far from complete. You're welcome to add any professional philosopher or philosophy department to the database, but please respect our standards about who can be included in Phylo. To add a new person or institution, start by typing a few letters of the person's or institution's name in the search box near the top left corner of the page. If you don't see what you're looking for, choose the 'Add a new person' or 'Add a new institution' options.

No, only one entry per person, rigidly designated, of course.

Yes, by clicking the ⊕ icon next to any piece of data. Please make sure this information is accurate. During submission, you’ll be asked to provide a source for that information. You’ll also have the option to upload an image that documents that information. This image is for verification purposes, should someone challenge the information you have provided, and you must agree that it falls within the terms of U.S. Copyright Law.

Ah, nonreferring expressions. You’ll need to create an entry for that individual or institution first before adding additional information. To add a person to Phylo, you’ll need to provide information that he/she (a) received a doctoral degree in philosophy, (b) taught in a philosophy department, and/or (c) published an article in a philosophical journal or a book included in PhilPapers or categorized under the Library of Congress subject heading ‘Philosophy’. To add an institution, you’ll need to provide its location (city and state). Whenever you attempt to add a new entry, Phylo will check for possible duplicates in the system.

At the moment, you can add information about degrees, dissertations (including advisors and committees), and faculty appointments for any philosopher since 1861 (the date of the first dissertation in North America). If there are other kinds of information you’d like to see in Phylo, please suggest them in the Future plans section of Phylo Forum.

If you feel certain the information is wrong and you know the correct information, you can change it yourself by clicking the ⊕ icon next to any piece of data. You should see the change once you save the update and the display refreshes.

If you’d like to contribute a large portion of data, please contact us at phylo@phylo.info. We can provide spreadsheets and other solutions to simplify collection and uploading. We can also suggest some great places to start looking for data.

There are several ways to contribute to Phylo. First, you can help by adding information on yourself and others to the database—and encouraging others to do the same. Phylo relies on user-submissions to expand and update information quickly and efficiently. Second, you can participate in Phylo Forum by adding suggestions, research topics, ways to use Phylo in teaching and research, and so on. Finally, if you’re interested in helping with major data collection or web coding and development, please contact us at phylo@phylo.info. We’ll be happy to hear from you.

We rely on user submissions for new dissertations and faculty appointments. (We can also accept information on new and old publications.) If you come across information that is outdated, please challenge or change it.

The phenomenal realm. More specifically, we collect static data from primary documents (dissertations, college catalogs, bibliographies and indexs, etc.) and user-submissions (we request citations for all submissions). In the future, we plan to access dynamic data on publications from available sources.

At present, you can see citations provided for a piece of data by mousing over the ⊕ icon next to that data. In the future, we hope to show status indicators, which will show you whether that piece of information is

• verified (checked against a source by an administrator)
• challenged (flagged as suspect by a user)
• documented (with an uploaded image to inspect)
• undocumented (without an uploaded image to inspect)

At the moment, we’re still collecting major pieces of data. Once that’s done, we’ll develop some displays that show much information we’ve compiled and that estimate how much more is out there. We’re currently thinking about third-party measures of completeness, including dynamic comparisons with other research tools.

If you believe some information is incorrect, challenge it. If there’s no documentation on file, an email request will automatically be sent to the uploader. If there is documentation on file, we’ll check it out and mark the information as verified or request an additional source from the uploader. If you feel certain the information is wrong and you know the correct information, you can change it yourself by clicking the ⊕ icon next to any piece of data. You should see the change once you save the update and the display refreshes.

Most existing search tools are limited to a few kinds of publications—books and journal articles—and they relate those publications using keywords. Phylo collects information on many kinds of things—people, places, and publications—and displays connections among them through networks, timelines, and maps. You should get much of the same information from searching Phylo as you do with other search tools, but you’ll also get a wealth of contextual information to make those citations more meaningful.

Phylo should eventually include data from institutions beyond North America. Other institutions may be more difficulty because of language issues. Major expansions will depend on funding or the effort of local individuals in adding their own institution’s data. If you’d like to help with this effort, please contact us at phylo@phylo.info.

Hopefully, but that’s a bit harder. There aren’t always the same institutions and documents around. Adding older information will require setting up some data standards, as well as ways of relating that information to our current data. If you have suggestions, please share them under the Future plans section of Phylo Forum.

Subscribe to the Phylo Blog RSS feed. We announce all updates and changes through Phylo Blog. If you’re a registered user, you can also request to receive email notifications when posts are added.

Phylo lets you access and edit information about professional philosophers. The best way to do this is to go to Phylo's home page. (You'll need JavaScript enabled in your web browser to take advantage of our home page.)

Finding information on Phylo. To get started using Phylo, find the search box near the top left corner of each page. Type the name of a philosopher, college, or university and click 'Go'. Our database currently focuses on philosophers who studied or taught in North America since the late 1800's, you'll get the best results if you search for a 20th century American philosopher. We hope to expand to other times and geographical areas in the future.

You'll see information about the person or institution that you searched for in two ways. On the lefthand side, you'll see a "details panel" containing a list of the information we have about that person or institution. On the righthand hand, you'll see that same information displayed on a timeline. You can click and drag the timeline to move around. If your mouse has a scrollwheel, you can use that, too. Hold shift while using the scrollwheel to scroll horizontally. You can also click on the icons in the timeline to see more information.

Adding information to Phylo. We'd love for you to edit or add to the information in our database. You'll need to log in or create a free account to do so. You can always find instructions on adding or editing information from the "Get help" section of the main menu at the top of the page.

In the Log In link at the top right, click “Forgot username/password?” and Phylo will send an email to the address that you gave us when you created your account.

Anonymous users can

• search Phylo and explore visualizations
• read blog and forum entries
• subscribe to RSS feeds

Registered users can also

• challenge suspect information
• change/add information
• access their personal home pages
• receive notifications when data is added/changed
• make blog comments and forum posts
• receive email updates on blog entries

We need to track who’s uploading what information and have a way to contact that person in case someone challenges undocumented information. There are lots of side-benefits to registering as well, including personalized home pages that allow you to easily add your own information, notifications that tell you when someone has changed information you’ve added or when someone has uploaded information you’re looking for, and hopefully more in the future.