The Art of Life project

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenSLRLN March 2013 St Louis MO Art of Life project

The Art of Life project


What is Art of Life?

• Full title - The Art of Life: Data Mining and Crowdsourcing the Identification and Description of Natural History Illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL)

• Grant given to Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis• Funded by National Endowment for the Humanities• Runs May 2012-April 2014


What is BHL?

• A consortium of natural history, botanical libraries and research institutions

• An open access digital library for historic biodiversity literature

• An open data repository of taxonomic names and bibliographic information


Member Institutions• Academy of Natural Sciences Library and Archives• American Museum of Natural History Library • California Academy of Sciences Library• Cornell University Library • The Field Museum Library• Harvard University Botany Libraries • Harvard University, Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology • Library of Congress • Marine Biological Laboratory / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library• Missouri Botanical Garden Library• Natural History Museum, London, Library & Archives• The New York Botanical Garden • Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Library & Archives• Smithsonian Institution Libraries • United States Geological Survey Libraries


BHL FT Staff


BHL Global



BHL Browse


BHL Search


BHL Scientific Names


BHL Book viewer


BHL copyright and licensing

Public Domain Content Files Public Domain

Copyrighted Content Files

Metadata, OCR, Scientific Names


BHL provides data via:• APIs• Data exports• OpenURL• OAI-PMH


The website and webservice BioStor by Rod Page provides tools for extracting, annotating, and visualising information on literature from BHL (http://biostor.org/). In this example, Rod has identified articles found in the Proceedings of the United States National Museum.

Reuse of BHL data

http://biostor.org/

http://biostor.org/

http://biostor.org/issn/0096-3801

http://biostor.org/issn/0096-3801


Reuse of BHL data

Ryan Schenk is using publication dates of works in BHL to build histograms of the number of publications-per-year for specific species, In this example, the Guniea Pig (http://synynyms.no.de/ )

http://ryanschenk.com/2011/02/visualizing-taxonomic-synoymns/

http://ryanschenk.com/2011/02/visualizing-taxonomic-synoymns/



Why the need for Art of Life?

Problem statement – users want access to images, access to images is limited to page by page scroll or viewing selection of images in Flickr, not searchable by image content (e.g. corn, zea mays)



5 Primary Objectives of Art of Life

Objective 1: Define an appropriate metadata schema for natural history illustrations

Objective 2: Build software tools to automatically identify illustrations in the BHL corpus

Objective 3: Enhance existing tools to enable the initial sorting, viewing, and editing of these identified visual resources.

Objective 4: Integrate tagging applications to enable a community of users to edit descriptive metadata for the illustrations

Objective 5: Integrate the descriptive metadata generated by users back into BHL portal both for access and preservation



Current status of Art of Life• Development of the algorithm is about 90% complete and will

be done by April 2013• Draft schema for describing natural history illustrations

available for public review http://tinyurl.com/9hm7nsb• Classifier tool – reusing an existing BHL tool developed by Joel

Richard called Macaw http://code.google.com/p/macaw-book-metadata-tool/


4 algorithms that have been tested• Analysis of the scanning metadata, aka picture block data,

contained within the OCR files generated as part of the Internet Archive scanning process.

• Application of a technique that evaluates the vertical composition of a page by applying contrast and scaling transformations.

• Analysis of the image compression ratio for scanned pages.• Analysis of color properties of scanned pages.


UI for Review of Algorithm


Art of Life SchemaNeeds to support three objectives:

(1) to enable the discovery, description and use of the identified images by artists, biologists, humanities scholars, librarians, and educators;(2) to make BHL’s metadata and images available to other platforms; and(3) to import crowdsourced metadata generated in other platforms back into BHL.


Schema landscape review– VRA Core 4.0 (borrowed 9 elements)– LIDO– Darwin Core (borrowed 2 elements)– Dublin Core


ART OF LIFE SCHEMA ELEMENTS red =required

TitleTypeDateCopyrightSourceAgentSubjectsDescriptionInscription


Title Stictospiza formosa

Type Paintings

Date Publication: 1898

Agent Author: Arthur G. Butler (1844-1925)Illustrator: F.W. Frohawk (1861-1946)

Description A pair of finches with green and yellow bodies resting on reeds

Subjects Scientific name: Amandava formosa (Latham, 1790) Vernacular Name: Green Avadavat or Green MuniaAccepted Name: Amandava formosa (Latham, 1790) Birds, finches

Inscriptions bottom center: Green Amaduvade Waxbill (Stictospiza formosa)

Source Butler, Arthur Gardiner. Foreign finches in captivity. Hull and London: Brumby and Clarke, limited,1889 (2nd edition). This image comes from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and is available online at biodiversitylibrary.org/page/17195895

Rights Public domain

Example of illustration described using Art of Life schema

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Biodiversity_Heritage_Library

http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/17195895


How will this project benefit libraries?• Significant resource of natural history images that will be made openly

accessible and reusable.• Useful to varying audiences: artists, biologists, humanities scholars,

particularly historians of science; librarians, education and outreach. Anyone who uses images in their research and teaching.

• Algorithm will be made available and can be used on any text collections with OCR output.

• Schema can be applied to other image collections that contain a large

number of natural history illustrations.


Thanks to Art of Life team!PI

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenAlgorithm development

Ed Bachta, Charlie Moad, Kyle Jaebker, Indianapolis Museum of ArtSchema development

Gaurav Vaidya and Robert Guralnick, University of Colorado, BoulderWilliam Ulate, Missouri Botanical Garden

ProgrammingMike Lichtenberg, Missouri Botanical Garden

Consultants Doug Holland, Missouri Botanical Garden; Chris Freeland, Washington University (former PI for Art of Life)


Interested? Here’s how you can help• We welcome your feedback on the schema! http://tinyurl.com/9hm7nsb• If you know of scholars and users who would be interested in these types

of images and would be interested either in participating in our survey or a brief focus groups about the schema please have them contact me [email protected]

• Would love to talk with other folks about their experiences with crowdsourcing of metadata, particularly if you’ve used flickr or Wikimedia commons

mailto:[email protected]


For more info http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life

Contact: [email protected]@mobot.org

http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life

mailto:[email protected]

Technology

The Art of Life project