Variations on a tree

The family tree is like an inherited “object” that has been passed down through many generations, with many and varied definitions which distort the tree both as a combinatorial object and in its visual representations. Moreover, whether used by amateur genealogists or academic researchers, it is always contextualized by both validated exogenous knowledge and by implicit knowledge. In this paper, we explore introducing certain contextual information that is associated with a locally defined dissimilarity between individuals of the same generation. We propose a new heuristic based on a radial representation of a node-link model which seeks to preserve local proximities in the layout. This heuristic is applied in an original form, which is that of Pierre Rosenstiehl’s “scientific family tree”.