Biodiversity Specimen Label Transcription Hackathon

[Ben Brumfield]

The organizers of the Biodiversity Specimen Label Transcription
Hackathon have extended their deadline to November 15 and asked me to
reach out to people outside bioinformatics, particularly developers in
genealogy and the humanities. Note that expenses for participants are
funded.

For those interested in exploring crowdsourcing, indexing tools, and
OCR, this is a really neat opportunity to see what's going on in
natural science collections. In my opinion, the creation of
structured databases from heterogeneous type- and handwritten source
images has direct parallels to the work being done building
genealogical record databases.

I attended a different hackathon (Augmenting OCR) in February and
learned a tremendous amount about OCR. Better yet, one of the tools I
developed for processing entomology labels was re-used successfully by
folks at the Early Modern OCR Project for their work dealing with
18th-century English printed books, proving that at least some of the
techniques have relevance outside of biodiversity studies.

I wrote up the experience here:
http://manuscripttranscription.blogspot.com/search/label/hackathon
(see especially the third post), and am crushed not to be able to
attend this event next month.

Ben Brumfield
http://fromthepage.com/

Forwarded announcement:

Biodiversity Specimen Label Transcription Hackathon

iDigBio (www.idigbio.org) and Zooniverse's Notes from Nature Project
(www.notesfromnature.org) are pleased to announce a hackathon to
further enable public participation in online transcription of
biodiversity specimen labels. There are approximately 1 billion
specimens of this type in US collections alone, but it is estimated
that information from just 10% of them is currently digitized and
online. Digitization of natural history collections grants
researchers access to vast quantities of information in their
investigations of timely subjects such as climate change, invasive
species, and the extinction crisis. The magnitude of the task of
bringing those collections into digital format exceeds that of any
single organization and will require new, Internet-scale approaches to
engage the public. This is an exciting opportunity to work on a
ground-breaking citizen-science endeavor with immediate and strong
impacts in the areas of biodiversity research and applied
conservation.

The event will occur from December 16-20, 2013, at iDigBio in
Gainesville, FL. There is up to $1200 for support of travel and
lodging for each participant.

The hackathon will produce new functionality and interoperability for
Zooniverse's Notes from Nature (www.notesfromnature.org) and similar
transcription tools. There are four areas of development that will be
progressively addressed throughout the week. On Monday, the focus
will be (1) linking images registered to the iDigBio Cloud to
transcription tools to create efficiency and alleviate storage issues.
Starting on Tuesday, topics will include (2) transcription QA/QC and
the reconciliation of replicate transcriptions, (3) integration of OCR
into the transcription workflow, and (4) new UI features and novel
incentive approaches for public engagement.

We expect that most participants will arrive on Monday afternoon and
depart on Friday late afternoon/evening or Saturday morning. There
will be a social at the Florida Museum of Natural History on
Wednesday, December 18. There will be opportunities to narrow the
focus in each category of activity in a teleconference tentatively
scheduled for early in the week of November 25.

**If you wish to be considered for one of about ten open invitations
(of a total of about 30), please send (1) your CV/resume, (2) a short
description (<250 words) of your relevant expertise (citing example
products where appropriate), (3) the development areas that interest
you (of the four numbered above), and (4) the days that you can attend
to Austin Mast (am...@bio.fsu.edu) by Friday, November 15, for assured
consideration. At least 3 slots will be reserved for qualified
graduate students.**

With best regards,

Austin and Rob Guralnick (UC-Boulder), co-organizers

Austin Mast
____________________________________

Associate Professor · Director, Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium ·
Associate Editor, Systematic Biology and Systematic Botany ·
Treasurer, American Society of Plant Taxonomists · Steering Committee
Member, iDigBio, The National Resource for Advancing Digitization of
Biodiversity Collections

Department of Biological Science · 319 Stadium Drive · Florida State
University · Tallahassee, FL 32306-4295 · U.S.A.

Office is King Life Science Building, room 4065 · Lab is King Life
Science Building, rooms 4068 and 4084 · Herbarium is Biological
Science Unit One, room 100

Voice: 1 (850) 645-1500 · Fax: 1 (850) 645-8447 · am...@bio.fsu.edu