Notes From Nature Talk

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  • reddder by reddder

    I'm really disappointed to see that some [how much] of what we are doing in CALBUG may already be in the records. Are we really wasting our time? Is it just easier for management to let us shuffle on than to investigate/fix the issues which the volunteers raise? This approach to non-management can really cause a crisis of confidence w/in the workforce. As Bonnie has mentioned before, and as I know myself, these issues seem to be unique to NFN. If this project is so far down the totem pole that virtually no resources are dedicated to its care & feeding, perhaps the management could give the workers a break & declare a hiatus until they can properly run this project?

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  • DZM by DZM admin

    I'm going to talk to the science team about this and try to figure out what's going on. Sending an email right now.

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  • poboyski by poboyski scientist

    I hope I can shed some light on this. There is a set of specimens, the dragonflies and damselflies, that were entered by both the in-house staff at the Essig Museum, and through our citizen science community at Notes from Nature. It is a "control" group, if you will, to compare the costs, amount of time, and data quality between doing the transcriptions at the Essig and through Zooniverse. The Essig Museum is one of the first institutions to attempt to database a million arthropod specimens. Besides wanting to add the data to our open access, online database for everyone to use, we are also researching the best ways to capture collecting data.

    As you all know, the scientific method attempts to keep all factors constant and vary only one factor at a time to test hypotheses. In this case, the hypothesis is that Citizen Scientist can transcribe data at least as well (for data quality) as in-house staff. We could not let you know which images were being compared in the study because we did not want you to pay special attention to them. Your role, therefore, has been two-fold: as a data transcriber AND as a data point! You are truly part of the scientific process. These results will be published in a paper at the end of the project, which we will summarize as a post on the Notes From Nature site.

    There should not be repeat images of other insect groups. It is possible that you see images of several specimens of the same species from the same place because we tend to collect lots of things at one time. Also, once the images have been transcribed by our Notes From Nature team they are downloaded to our online database (that many of you were clever enough to find). So you should see data in the database that you transcribed in months past. We do some cleanup - sometimes we rearrange the word order or spell things out to match the formatting of existing data. This is especially true for the localities - it is surprising how many ways collectors can write the same location. We have to "normalize" these data before we georeference them (ie. mark the point on a map) to be sure they really are the same place.

    We are all eternally grateful to our Notes From Nature team for your dedication and amazing productivity. I apologize if we do not say that often enough.

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  • reddder by reddder

    Thanks again for setting the record straight on our modus operandi. My faith has been restored.

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  • Mr._Kevvy by Mr._Kevvy

    Well I hope this means that all my blathering in the object comments is for a good cause. 😄

    Thanks for the update. (Er, not that I do anything but Herbarium but it's good to know nonetheless!)

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  • poboyski by poboyski scientist

    I completely understand. Sitting alone in our museum of 5+ million specimens I often wonder if there is anyone else out there!

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  • DZM by DZM admin

    Your comments have been extremely helpful, @poboyski ... thank you so much!! 😃

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