Decode Darwin's Handwriting To Help Science
Darwin's Chicken Scratch A beetle collected by Charles Darwin in Tierra del Fuego, Chile in 1833. Courtesy UC Berkeley News Center A citizen science project is transcribing handwritten field notes for more than a million insect specimens. Do you have a special talent for reading scribbled handwriting and an interest in looking at dead bugs? Rather than setting a handful of bleary-eyed undergrads with the task of transcribing hand-written field notes that correspond with its more than a million insect specimens, Calbug, a consortium of nine major entomological collections from across California, is opening the project up to the public, asking citizen scientists to help convert the records into an electronic form so they can be made available worldwide. Led by the University of California, Berkeley's Essig Museum of Entomology, the crowd-sourced transcription project will digitize field notes and records that correspond to insect specimens in their collections, some of...