{"id":1301,"date":"2010-11-15T14:46:26","date_gmt":"2010-11-15T19:46:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/?p=1301"},"modified":"2010-11-17T11:34:05","modified_gmt":"2010-11-17T16:34:05","slug":"building-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/2010\/11\/15\/building-characters\/","title":{"rendered":"Building Character(s)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Although it is late start today, owing to all the excitement over having Kati back in the house, I return to the morphospace with an unusual amount of gusto this morning. I finally have a pile of notes on the characters in those 98% of the 166 genera I&#8217;ve looked at. I&#8217;m still missing info on three genera, but I&#8217;m willing to let those go for the time being for the sake of moving on. If I find descriptions for them later on, they&#8217;ll fit in the framework I&#8217;ve got; if not, they&#8217;re not going to drastically change the answer I get.<\/p>\n<p>The next phase of the morphospace project is the most exciting, because it is the most creative part\u2014but it is also the trickiest bit. Here I need to distill my notes into a list of characters and character states that will describe all of the different morphologies I&#8217;ve seen in the 163 genera I&#8217;ve looked at.<\/p>\n<p>The first challenge, which I think will be one of the more formidable ones, is how to describe the outline shape of the valve face. The idea that&#8217;s been lurking in the back of my head has been to use the number of sides of a shape as the primary character set. Thus, a circle would have a character state of 1 (a circle has 1 side), basically all of the pennate diatoms would have a character state of 2, the triangular forms would take value 3, and the few quadrangular forms would have a value of 4. Now, this gets me the basic shape, but that doesn&#8217;t in and of itself solve the problem, because there&#8217;s a wider range of valve face morphologies to cover.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/files\/2010\/11\/Untitled.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1303 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/files\/2010\/11\/Untitled-300x117.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"117\" srcset=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/files\/2010\/11\/Untitled-300x117.png 300w, https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/files\/2010\/11\/Untitled.png 425w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Although it is late start today, owing to all the excitement over having Kati back in the house, I return to the morphospace with an unusual amount of gusto this morning. I finally have a pile of notes on the characters in those 98% of the 166 genera I&#8217;ve looked at. I&#8217;m still missing info [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14607],"tags":[16233],"class_list":["post-1301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-journal","tag-morphospace"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1301"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1344,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301\/revisions\/1344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}