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<p>I'm ambivalent regarding verbatim label data, because it can be
extremely helpful in some cases, and extremely damaging in others.</p>
<p>Some of you may recall my having given talks, or unhappy comments
at meetings, regarding the empirical data on error rates on
original labels of insect specimens. It's pretty disheartening;
across tens of thousands of specimens in roughly 10 major
entomological museums assayed, somewhere between 15-20% of all
original labels had data omissions or errors requiring correction
prior to georeferencing. While a fair percentage of these are
omissions that are easily fixed, or obvious typos, roughly half
either cannot be fixed (e.g., a place name that occurs in more
than one county, like "Sulphur Springs, Arkansas"), or are errors
that MUST be fixed but are not immediately obvious.</p>
<p>Such statements have been known to provoke people to roll their
eyes at me, thinking that I overstate the problem, but it's a
genuine issue, and includes lines of evidence that aren't
immediately obvious, such as comparing labels produced by
different people who were collecting together. Just as a
"tip-of-the-iceberg" example, consider these data labels, produced
by six professional researchers from several high-profile
entomology museums on an NSF-funded field trip to Mexico:</p>
<p>Chihuahua, 72 km NE Chihuahua, El Carrion, 27-VIII-91<br>
Chihuahua, El Corrion, 72 km NE Chihuahua, 27-VIII-91<br>
Chihuahua, El Morrion, 67 km NW Chihuahua, 27-VIII-91, 1200 m<br>
Chihuahua, 67 km N El Morrion, 27-VIII-91<br>
Chihuahua, 67 km N El Morrion, 27-III-91<br>
Chihuahua, 74 km NE Chihuahua, 27-VIII-91<br>
</p>
<p>These labels all refer to the exact same collecting event, yet
you'll note that no two are the same. You'll also note that <b>in
the absence of the comparison</b>, none of them has an obvious
error. <br>
</p>
<p>Worse still, <b>they are all wrong</b>. The actual data for this
particular collecting event are<br>
<br>
Chihuahua, El Morrion, 67 km NE Chihuahua, 27-VIII-91, 1200 m</p>
<p>As such, the six labels produced had (1) and (2) the wrong
mileage <b>and</b> the wrong place name (3) the wrong cardinal
direction (4) the wrong reference point (5) the wrong reference
point and the wrong month, and (6) the wrong mileage. Note also
that the georeferences generated for these six labels result in
two points that are 67 km from the actual location, and one over
100 km off.<br>
</p>
<p>When you look specifically for examples like this, with multiple
collectors' data used side-by-side to evaluate label accuracy,
it's frightening how poorly people do. It also means that treating
verbatim label data as <b>inherently trustworthy</b> is a serious
mistake. As data suppliers and consumers, we need to be far more
critical. Label data underlies so much of people's research, and
if we supply or use bad data, that undermines the quality of the
resulting research.<br>
</p>
<p>The question is whether we are better off displaying the verbatim
data, or not, and to me that depends on whether serious quality
control has or has not <b>already been exercised</b>.<br>
</p>
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<p>My points are these: <br>
</p>
<p>(1) If the process of data capture is limited to entering
verbatim label data and then simply parsing it out into other
fields, it is much less likely that the data capture person is
going to notice those labels that are in that roughly 10% where
the data are wrong but it isn't obvious. If the process of data
capture only uses verbatim data as the starting point, however,
then the person trying to make sense of a label by georeferencing
it themselves is relatively more likely to view it critically, and
catch any errors.</p>
<p>(2) If we assume for the moment that you have done the right
thing, and fixed an error, how are users of your data going to
know which version of the data they should trust? If a specimen
has verbatim data listing a country or state or county or mileage
or direction that is <b>not the same as the parsed data</b>, is
that not going to confuse them, if they notice the discrepancy?</p>
<p>(3) My overall feeling is that including verbatim data is only
genuinely beneficial to users if quality control has NOT been
applied, AND if external users have a reliable way to communicate
with the data providers to <b>report an error and get it fixed</b>.
In other words, having <b>bad</b> verbatim data made visible
makes it more likely that external users will find errors. If
quality control HAS been applied, and the data are clean, then the
discrepancy between verbatim and parsed data only stands to
confuse external users. Given that the specimens will have a GUID
label, any discrepancy between what the data labels say and what
the parsed data say won't be a problem, because the data labels
are not what you'll refer to when tracking a specimen down.</p>
<p>It's a complex issue.<br>
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Doug Yanega Dept. of Entomology Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314 skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html">https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html</a>
"There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82</pre>
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