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NESCent / popgenInfo

Vignettes for Population Genetics in R
http://popgen.nescent.org
MIT License
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Include Liam Revell's learnPopGen? #214

Open hlapp opened 5 years ago

hlapp commented 5 years ago

Liam Revell recently posted to EvolDir his development of the learnPopGen R package and accompanying R Shiny apps:

I'm very pleased to announce the official release of a new R package called learnPopGen that has been designed primarily for the purposes of teaching evolutionary biology, population genetics, and evolutionary theory. Functions of the package can be used to conduct simulations and numerical analyses of a wide range of evolutionary phenomena that would typically be covered in advanced undergraduate through graduate-level curricula in population genetics or evolution. For instance, learnPopGen functions can be used to visualize gene frequency changes through time under multiple deterministic and stochastic processes, to compute and animate the changes in phenotypic trait values or distributions under natural selection, to numerically analyze and graph the outcome of simple game theory models, and to plot coalescence within a population experiencing genetic drift, along with a number of other things. As much as possible, I have attempted to design functions of the package to be maximally didactic, for instance by using animated visualizations. For instructor use within lecture materials, it is also straightforward to export plots and animations from R in the form of flat or animated graphics, or as videos.

Instructors interested in using functions of learnPopGen for teaching have two options. For maximum flexibility, students working with the package can be guided to run functions directly in R. However, under many circumstances (for instance, if learning to run the package in R would be a distraction in realizing the pedagogical objectives of the segment) instructors may instead choose to guide students to one of various web interfaces that I have built for a number of the functions of the package using the shiny web application framework. These web interfaces are already available for public use online.

learnPopGen can be installed locally from CRAN (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/learnPopGen/) or from its webpage (https://github.com/liamrevell/learnPopGen) and run from any computer that has R.

All currently built web interfaces are available on the learnPopGen web interfaces page: http://www.phytools.org/PopGen/.

Should we include this on the website in some form, and if so, which form might be best suited?