Status Update: what are BHL’s current priorities?

William Ulate, Martin Kalfatovic

S. Dillon Ripley CenterSmithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

12 November 2015

Technical Group at MBG

Mike LichtenbergDeveloper

Trish Rose-SandlerData Analyst

William UlateTechnical Director

Technical Support

MBG IT DivisionManage servers, systems and

telecommunications.Installs software needed

And others:MBLSmithsonianInternet Archive

BHL-AustraliaBHL-Europe

Technical Advisory Group

BHL Work Plan 2015 - 2017http://bit.ly/2136eP7

Priorities

BHL Infrastructure at SILDOI’s for ArticlesNEH Art of Life ٧IMLS Purposeful Gaming To end by Nov.

30thIMLS Mining Biodiversity To end by Dec.

31st

(1 year No-cost ext.)

Art of Life

Art of Life

Art of Life

Currently….

We have now processed the 35 million pages that we committed to for the project. 

 Significantly more numbers of BHL images are

now available on Flickr (see BHL blog post on tagging over 1 million images)

 We launched a selection of 19th century BHL

images in the Zooniverse platform this week  (see BHL blog post on Science Gossip)

Science Gossip (sciencegossip.org/)

Purposeful Gaming

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OCR Improvements

GamingTranscription

Purposeful gaming and BHL: engaging the public in improving and

enhancing access to digital textsIMLS Grant Program:

National Leadership Grants for Libraries Partners:

Missouri Botanical GardenHarvard UniversityCornell UniversityNew York Botanical Garden

P.I.: Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenDates: Dec 2013 – Nov. 2015

Project objectives and benefits

Test new means of crowdsourcing to support the enhancement of content in BHL

Demonstrate if digital games are an effective tool for analyzing and improving digital outputs from OCR and transcription

Benefits of gaming include:improved access to content by providing richer and more accurate

data; an extension of limited staff resources; and exposure of library content to communities who may not know about

the collections otherwise.

Beanstalk and Smorball

Smorballgame.org

Beanstalkgame.org

Purposeful Gaming

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.

Best Serious Game Award at the Boston Festival of Indie Games

2015

Purposeful Gaming

OCR Improvements

German text interpreted by the OCR process as: “unb auf ben ©elnrgen be6 fublic{)en”

AOCR Improvements

Different resulting texts from parsing the phrase:“und auf den Gebirgen des südlichen Deutschlands”

(“and on the mountains of southern Germany”)

 

  IA OCR OCR 2 Transcription 1

Transcription 2  

1 unb und und und Ok

2 den ben den den Ok

3 ©elnrgen ©ebirgen Bebirgen Gebirgen X

4 be6 des de5 des Chk

5 fublic{)en fublichen Füdlichen Südlichen X

6 £)eittfc{)(anb6 Deutfchlanbs Deutfchlands Deutschlands X

http://miningbiodiversity.com/http://miningbiodiversity.org/

Mining Biodiversity

Mining Biodiversity: Enriching Biodiversity Heritage with Text Mining and Social Media

One of the international projects that won in the third round of the 2013 Digging Into Data Challenge

Promote the development of innovative computational techniques to apply into big data in the humanities and social sciencesThe National Centre for Text Mining (UK)Missouri Botanical Garden (US) Dalhousie University's Big Data Analytics Institute (Canada) Social Media Lab (Canada)

MiBIO: Mining Biodiversity

1. Automatic error correction of OCR text errors.

2. Crowdsource annotation of legacy texts with semantic metadata.

3. Adapt text mining techniques to extract terminology, entities and significant events automatically and to track terminology evolution over time.

4. Use Interactive visualization techniques to help users manage search results through next generation browsing capabilities, assisted by a semantic similarity network of important terms and entities.

5. Design of a social media layer, serving as an environment for diverse users to interact and collaborate on science, public education, awareness and outreach.

MiBIO: Mining Biodiversity

Crowdsource Markup

Display text Species Profile Model category

General/summary TaxonBiology

Geographic range Distribution

Habitat Habitat

Food sources and feeding behavior TrophicStrategy

Physical description (general) Description

Physical description (detailed

morphology)

DiagnosticDescription

Thank youWilliam UlateBHL Technical DirectorMissouri Botanical Gardenwilliam.ulate@mobot.orgSkype: william_ulate_r