Notes from Nature

Next week, Zooniverse is holding their annual meeting of project science teams. Since Ali and Craig are both still in Tanzania, I’m going to be the only Snapshot Serengeti representative there, but I’m super excited to go. I went to this meeting last year, while we were still developing Snapshot Serengeti, and it was both really fun (the Zooniverse team in Chicago are awesome) and really useful. Since Zooniverse already had a dozen other projects live, I got a lot of advice from their science team members about what to expect when the Snapshot Serengeti went live, and also tips on analyzing the large data set that results from the project. This year, I’ll be one of the people giving tips to the scientists of developing projects.

Speaking of which, if you haven’t already, you should go check out Notes from Nature, which launched this week. It’s a bit different from Snapshot Serengeti in that the species in the picture is already known, but what they don’t have is the meta-data (the date the specimen was collected, where it was collected, etc.) You help out by entering this information off of labels, many of which are hand-written and so hard to use OCR on. They have both a botany collection and an insect collection that they need help with. And there’s a Notes from Nature blog.