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Post by nomihoudai on Sept 3, 2013 7:57:37 GMT -8
It is now time to reveal the mystery. I can proudly announce that my new website is finally finished. A concept which came to my mind over a year ago. During the last centuries an invaluable amount of information has been gathered by a vast number of entomologists. Numerous journals do exist and have compiled thousands, even millions, of pages. Another very important information resource in an entomologists life are insect collections and their labels. Yet, extracting the information of these labels in bulk proves difficult. Some labels are handwritten, some contain different types of font. Many of them are obstructed partially by the insect pin or butterfly when seen from any angle. Despite all these problems the entomologist has little trouble reading the label. I have designed a website where people can register accounts and get shown butterfly labels from different museums around the world. The task is now to transcribe the information from the label into an easy form. In this way the data becomes digitally available to researchers. In order to make this a joyful experience I have added a little game. For each label you transcribe, you earn a credit. With these credits you can try to unlock 30 different butterflies that will be on display in your profile. A tutorial will guide you through the process and explain everything about the website. As many here will recognize, the butterflies that you will see are entirely out of the Lycaenidae family. The transcribed data will be made public and free to use via another website that I am working on. This website should become a compendium of the biology and taxonomy of the Lycaenidae family. I hope that the page will be a lot of fun. I thank already anyone that wants to participate and contribute. This thread here is open for discussions. PLEASE SHARE THE LINK WITH YOUR FRIENDS IF YOU LIKE THE CONCEPT. Thanks, Claude.
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Post by wollastoni on Sept 3, 2013 12:59:46 GMT -8
Congrats Claude ! Great idea and well designed website !
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Post by mantisboy on Sept 3, 2013 14:25:40 GMT -8
Do the data labels have to be from museum specimens, or would labels from personal collections be used too?
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Post by mantisboy on Sept 3, 2013 14:34:18 GMT -8
Never mind, I thought we were posting things that we saw in museums. I hadn't looked well at the website yet.
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Post by nomihoudai on Sept 4, 2013 2:46:47 GMT -8
Thank you very much Olivier. mantisboy, the website already has a whole database of pictures that it will show to you. These pictures are from my research database, taken in museums. There is no pictures of private collections in it. I have collected these pictures in order to make a website similar to Markku Savela's "Lepidoptera and some other life forms", but with more detail. While people enjoy the game and earn credits they will contribute to this new website. Some stats: Genera present in the pictures: 143 Species present in the pictures: 450 Labels in the database: 2800
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Post by dertodesking on Sept 4, 2013 13:12:19 GMT -8
Hi Claude,
Love the website and, maybe more importantly, the concept behind it.
Anyway, have registered and just transcribed 50 labels. I'll be back as often as I can to give my support to your project and hope many others on here will do also.
Simon
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Post by nomihoudai on Sept 4, 2013 15:15:17 GMT -8
Hello Simon, thank you for your kind comment and thank you for your help.
You are not the only one that has started to help to transcribe some labels. I hope that many more people will follow. When many people help, the individual one only has to contribute little to accomplish great things. In this sense let other people know about the website, if you think that they might enjoy it too.
Thx, Claude.
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Post by anthony on Sept 5, 2013 7:44:46 GMT -8
Congratulations to you on a unique concept and a job well done.
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Post by wollastoni on Sept 7, 2013 5:13:54 GMT -8
A good example of "Entomology in the 21st century" !
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Post by nomihoudai on Sept 8, 2013 13:23:15 GMT -8
Thank you Anthony!
Yes Olivier, computational methods will open many doors of knowledge previously closed.
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Post by joee30 on Sept 8, 2013 16:44:39 GMT -8
This site is pretty fun.
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Post by jonathan on Sept 9, 2013 2:10:00 GMT -8
Well done Claude. I have transcribed a couple of labels.
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Post by nomihoudai on Sept 11, 2013 8:56:17 GMT -8
Hi, it is now well over a week that I made the label-butterflies.com website public. I have been amazed by the positive feedback that I received during these days. 50 users have registered and are regularly contributing to the website. Over 1800 labels have been transcribed during these few days! The submitted labels contain well over 5000 informations that can be used to draw flight histograms and distribution maps for little studied genera and species. The website attracted people from over 30 countries. I hope that it can attract even more users, so please share the link with your family and friends if you like the page. Anyone can help and contribute to science. www.label-butterflies.comThanks to anyone that helped so far, Claude.
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Post by dertodesking on Sept 23, 2013 12:52:44 GMT -8
Anyone else got all 30 pictures? Simon
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Post by nomihoudai on Sept 24, 2013 8:27:12 GMT -8
Congratulations Simon! I hope you enjoy the pictures. For now I only have these 30 pictures but there might be future updates where new sets of pictures can become unlocked.
Last week I added a statistics update to the user section so that people can see how the website progresses. Currently there is 74 users and 4000 labels have been transcribed.
The next point on the to-do list is to add more labels to the database. I have visited 3 more museums these last two weeks and I took pics of thousands of labels.
Thanks, Claude.
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