[NHCOLL-L:5551] Re: Crowdsourcing labels

[andrea thomer]

Javier de la Torre at Vizzuality posted a great comment to our post that we
thought should be shared with NHCOLL (with his permission).  Further
comments either on the blog or on list still appreciated!  Javier's thoughts
below:

"Hi all,

It is is great to see all this interest on this idea. First of all I work at
Vizzuality which works with Zooniverse in OldWeather.

The idea is not brand new as has been commented. There are several projects
doing this already for different kind of collections, for example
Herbaria at Home (http://herbariaunited.org/atHome/).

Now the great thing about GalaxyZoo and Zoouniverse is the capability to
bring a very big community and keep them motivated to do the work. To do so
basically you need to take care of interfaces (think of gamification but
also user engagement) and a lot of love for the community (forums, showing
them the science behind it, etc.).

The regarding the quality of the data we are finding that the results of
crowdsourcing actually beat the results from “experts” doing the work.
People get tired, but if you manage to get tenths of different people to
digitize the same, the balanced result is better. Also motivation is a great
factor, in Oldweather for 97% of data items digitized, 3 persons have
written exactly the same thing, so people really take care of writing what
is there.

The Citizen Science Alliance (CSA http://www.citizensciencealliance.org/) is
the organization behind OldWeather,PlanetHunters and lot of those GalaxyZoo
projects. They just opened a call for proposals for citizen science projects
and I know some about biological collections label transcriptions had been
submitted.

The question is… we as a community can coordinate enough to use citizen
science as a service to digitize faster our collections? Can we agree on an
infrastructure where money from collection is spent on digitalizing
collections and the transcriptions is kept by projects like this? Of course
there will be other layers of data cleaning after the transcriptions are
done (like taxonomy reconciliation, location reconciliation, etc.) and of
course other methods like OCR might help.

I will be talking, hopefully, at TDWG about this, and we are looking for
partners to start a project like this. We need:

-Some funding, CSA has already some.
-Institutions partners that can bring data
-Scientist looking to get data quickly and do some science with it.
-People that want to help on the community. "

Again, comments wanted!

Andrea Thomer
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
http://soyouthinkyoucandigitize.wordpress.com/

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 7:57 AM, Norris, Christopher <
christopher.norris at yale.edu> wrote:

> Would you consider using crowdsourcing methods to transcribe handwritten
> specimen labels? Are you horrified by the idea? Do you have any idea what
> crowdsourcing is?
>
> Rob Guralnick from the University of Colorado is looking for feedback on
> this issue from the collections community. You can read more about it, and
> comment, by following this link:
>
>
> http://soyouthinkyoucandigitize.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/old-weathers-crowd-and-the-challenge-of-digitization/
> Regards,
>
> Chris
>
> =============================
> Dr. Christopher A. Norris
> Division of Vertebrate Paleontology
> Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History
> 170 Whitney Ave.
> PO Box 208118
> New Haven, CT 06520-8118
>
> Tel. +1(203)-432-3748
> Fax. +1(203)-432-9816
>
>
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