finding a goldmine of natural history illustrations within bhl texts: the art of life project

Trish Rose-Sandler, Missouri Botanical GardenTDWG Oct 2013 Florence Italy Art of Life project

Finding a goldmine of natural history illustrations within

BHL texts: the Art of Life project


BHL Problem statement – users want access to images, access to images is

limited – How to broaden the audiences for BHL content?


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


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 algorithms are complete. Running them

across entire BHL corpus now. • Draft schema for describing natural history illustrations was

posted for public review http://tinyurl.com/9hm7nsb. In process of converting to an application profile

• Classifier tool complete

http://tinyurl.com/9hm7nsb


Algorithms• Developed by folks at Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) Lab. • Built 4 primary types:

– ABBYY (87% accurate)– Contrast (88% accurate)– Color (.09% accurate)– Compression (9% accurate)

• Tested against a gold standard set of 100 books (40k pages)• ABBYY and Contrast were chosen as most effective in finding

illustrations


Interface designed for BHL to assess performance of algorithms


Interface developed to assign broad classes


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

3) to import crowdsourced metadata generated in other platforms back into BHL.


Schema landscape review– VRA Core 4.0 (art image community)– LIDO (museum community)– Dublin Core (Web community)– Darwin Core (biodiversity community)– Audubon Core (biodiversity community)


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 Birds, finchesScientific name: Amandava formosaVernacular Name: Green Avadavat or Green MuniaAccepted Name: Amandava formosa (Latham, 1790)

Inscriptions bottom center: Green Amaduvade Waxbill (Stictospiza formosa)

SourceButler, 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 the scientific community?• Will provide access to content in BHL that has been largely hidden and difficult to

find. Functionality will be added to the BHL portal to allow searching for images by species name, common names, subjects, and illustrators

• Once the images are available and described in places like Flickr and Wikimedia Commons they will become easily linked to and available in other biodiversity-related platforms such as Wikispecies and EOL

• Like the text content in BHL, most image content will fall under public domain and be freely available for download and re-use so you can incorporate them into your research and publications


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 before its finalized!

http://tinyurl.com/9hm7nsb• Would love to talk with other folks about their experiences with

crowdsourcing of metadata, particularly if you’ve used flickr or Wikimedia commons

• Spread the word about this free, rich resource of images http://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary and help us describe our illustrations!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary




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

[email protected]

finding a goldmine of natural history illustrations within bhl texts: the art of life project

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