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Citizen Science, Opportunity Costs and Growing Pains: Notes from Nature Turns 4 Months Old
Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Sala dei Continenti
Date: 2013-10-29 11:20 AM – 11:30 AM
Last modified: 2013-10-05
Abstract
Notes from Nature (http://www.notesfromnature.org) is a citizen science tool with a focus on label transcription of natural history collection specimens. This project was developed collaboratively by biodiversity scientists, natural history collections staff, and experts in citizen science project development, programming and visualization, all within the very well established and successful Zooniverse platform. This project currently brings together digital images representing different types of biodiversity records including ledgers, herbarium sheets and pinned insects from multiple projects and natural history collections. The specimen images are presented to citizen scientists who then volunteer their effort in transcribing textual data and metadata from these images. Each image is transcribed several times, providing a means to determine if transcriptions converge. As a measure of success, Notes from Nature has already produced more than 270,000 transcriptions from over 3500 citizen scientists since release in late April 2013. Beyond these basic tasks, the platform keeps volunteers engaged by initially explaining the scientific importance of the work via a short orientation, and then providing transcription "missions" along with dynamic feedback, interactivity and rewards. In addition, a 'Talk' page allows users to discuss interesting specimens or ask questions within a social networking framework allowing users to engage with one another as well as with the domain scientists. The software is a fully open source web transcription tool built using the latest web technologies. We present an overview of the tool and spend more time discussing myriad challenges that have arisen since launch of Notes from Nature, including the difficulty with getting data back to the providers, building the tools to create consensus transcriptions, developing governance models as Notes from Nature goes through growing pains.