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.

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