Public Participation Platforms
Public Participation Platforms
This page can be linked to using the shortlink, https://bit.ly/idigbio-ppplatforms.
iDigBio gathers information about public participation platforms to share with the natural history collections community, both as an online resource available to anyone, and as a reference specifically for participants in our Digitization Academy courses. We have asked representatives of each platform to respond to a survey containing a standard set of questions, which we believe can be helpful for potential new users comparing options. These surveys, as well as additional resources, are organized alphabetically below.
If you are a platform representative and wish to be added to this list, or to update the information here, please contact Erica Krimmel (ekrimmel@fsu.edu).
Die Herbonauten
Die Herbonauten is a herbarium specimen transcription platform addressing German speaking Citizen Scientists with a strong interest in botany and natural history in general.
DigiVol
DigiVol offers transcription and camera trap identification. It is Australian owned and based, and works closely with many local institutions. DigiVol is unconditional, free to use, and includes a choice of validation: volunteer manual or auto-consensus.
DoeDat
The DoeDat platform is designed for, and mainly directed towards, the transcription and enrichment of natural history collections. Over time, it has gained functionality that makes it attractive to other types of transcription tasks such as those in the digital humanities (postcards, maps, pictures, posters, etc.). DoeDat is also highly suitable for species detection and identification on camera trap (wild camera) images.
FromThePage
FromThePage focuses on textual transcription, OCR correction and metadata description of digitized documents.
GEOLocate CoGe
GEOLocate CoGe (Collaborative Georeferencing Platform) is designed to facilitate determining geospatial attributes where biological collections have been made.
Les Herbonautes
Notes from Nature
Notes From Nature's primary data providers are researchers and museums interested in transcription or classification of specimen images. The vast majority of these partners are from North America, but the platform is very interested in working with individuals or collections from other areas of the world.
Smithsonian Transcription Center
Launched in 2013, Transcription Center is the Smithsonian Institution’s largest crowdsourcing platform, enlisting the help of over 58,000 digital volunteers to transcribe and review over 946,000 pages of materials from across the Smithsonian’s vast museum and archival collections. With projects ranging in content from currency proof sheets and historic audio recordings to biodiversity specimens and astronomical logbooks, Transcription Center draws curious learners around the world looking to contribute to accessibility and discoverability of knowledge in their spare time.
Symbiota
Symbiota is an open-source software for managing and mobilizing biodiversity data. It is both a robust content management system (CMS) and a tool for biodiversity data exploration. As a CMS, Symbiota is specifically designed toward efficient, collaborative digitization with features including data entry from label images, data harvesting from specimen duplicates, batch georeferencing (even across collections), data validation and cleaning, generating progress reports, and additional tools. Learn more about Symbiota as a CMS here. As a data exploration tool, Symbiota includes species inventories, interactive identification keys, integrated specimen and field images, taxonomic information, species distribution maps, and taxonomic descriptions.
Zooniverse
Since the launch of its first project in 2007, Zooniverse has become a core part of the research infrastructure landscape. For research teams with large numbers of images, audio clips, or video files that need tagging, annotating, marking and/or transcribing, crowdsourcing the effort through Zooniverse provides a unique and effective solution to unlocking the large datasets that characterize our modern research landscape. With over 2 million participants worldwide in over 80 active projects, Zooniverse also provides a transformative tool for meaningfully engaging the public in real research and discovery.