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Engaging the citizen scientist in content enhancement for BHL
Trish Rose-Sandler, William Ulate, Max Seidman, Mary Flanagan, Geoffrey Belknap,
Victoria Van Hyning, Jim O'Donnell
TDWG 2015Nairobi, Kenya
Introduction
This presentation will discuss two current crowdsourcing activities that the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has initiated.
• Zooniverse platform – Science Gossip• Two online games – Beanstalk and Smorball
Zooniverse platform(www.zooniverse.org)
Zooniverse platform(www.zooniverse.org)
Science Gossip (sciencegossip.org/)
Why we are doing this?
• Content enhancement. • We want to search the data in
ways that we currently can't.• Engage new audiences with BHL
content outside of our own portal users.
Crowdsourcing
• Crowdsourcing is a way to tackle known tasks with limited staff when we don't have too many resources
Why we are doing this?
Illustrations discovery, tagging and description
• Illustration discovery is the need,• Illustration tagging is the task and • Science Gossip is the site in the
Zooniverse platform.
Science Gossip – Zooniverse
• Partner with a team in UK called ConSciCom (Constructing Scientific Communities) that analyses Citizen Science of the 19th Century and the 21st Century.– ConSciCom provided the Subject Expertise, – BHL provided the content (19th Century Periodicals)
and – Zooniverse provided the platform (and IT Support)
in which users are asked to classify and describe natural history illustrations from 19th century periodicals found within the BHL.
• Step 1. Are there illustrations on the page? • Step 2. Ask users to draw boundaries around an
illustration in the page• Step 3. Classify it.• Step 4. Mark species, inscriptions and
contributors• Step 5. Talk! - A key piece to user engagement!
Quality control. Frequent users turned into moderators. FAQ creators.
Advantages• Details of Talk – After seeing in action, giving heavy users a place to commune
with other taggers. First time comments around BHL content from an audience that was mostly new to BHL.
• We had a labor-ready workforce in the Zooniverse platform was already formed, they had the critical mass community.
• Took a moderate quantity of our own resources and time to develop because of the possibility of leveraging the platform that already existed – website up in a couple of months.
• Embedded quality control
• Experience in different fields by each of the stakeholders
Disadvantages
• Challenge of having to handle multiple verifications.
Beanstalk and Smorball
Smorballgame.org
Beanstalkgame.org
How does it work?
Best Serious Game Award at the Boston Festival of Indie Games 2015
Thank you• Trish Rose-Sandler
Principal InvestigatorPurposeful Gaming and BHL
• Smorball and Beanstalk were designed as part of the Purposeful Gaming and BHL project , which explores how digital games can make scanned content more accessible and searchable for cultural institutions.
• Based at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, Missouri, “Purposeful Gaming and BHL” was established in 2013 through an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant and includes partners at Harvard University, Cornell University, and The New York Botanical Garden.