Play Digital Fishers Now

Harold Smith has become something of a legend around our offices; this prolific citizen scientist has now contributed over 10,000 (and counting) annotations to our video database. He’s doing this via DigitalFishers (related news story), our Web-based crowd sourcing site, which relies on volunteers to support deep-ocean science by analyzing underwater video clips.

The DigitalFishers leader board on 21 March 2012.  On this day, Harold contributed 280 annotations and became our first user to break the 10,000 annotation barrier.

Harold is our current all-time leader, and his annotations are helping scientists tackle questions such as:

• What environmental factors influence the distribution of species in the deep?
• What is the biodiversity associated with deep-sea environments?
• How do species interact with each other and with their environment?

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Dr. Kate Moran’s  recent TEDx talk, 12 November 2011 was released on TED today.   Look for Dr. Moran’s discussion about Digital Fishers and how you can get involved at 12:39 in the presentation.

The video from her presentation is available on http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxVancouver-Dr-Kate-Moran-Con .

Dr. Kate Moran, Director of NEPTUNE Canada, is a world-renowned ocean engineer, holding degrees in marine science and engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Rhode Island and Dalhousie University. Her research focuses on marine geotechnics and its application to the study of paleoclimate, tectonics and seafloor stability. Dr. Kate Moran has led many major oceanographic expeditions, including the first drilling expedition to the Arctic Ocean in 2004. The following year she led the first expedition to find the source of the earthquake that caused the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. She has also made major contributions to the assessment of seafloor hazards in Canada’s offshore regions.

We’ve been receiving reports of log-in troubles over the past several hours. Our systems folks are on the job and we hope to post a resolution to this very soon. Thanks to everyone who let us know, and for your patience.

Thanks also for your awesome work. We surpassed the 20,000-annotations mark the other day, and that’s before we’ve even had our full release!

Digital Fishers was featured in a brief news report on CBC Radio World Report on December 30 2011. The edited audio clip can be found here:

Later that same day, there was a longer version of a report on NEPTUNE Canada, again with a brief mention of Digital Fishers. That edited audio clip can be found here:

The easy way to think about the Digital Fishers project is a system that enlists volunteers (you the crowd) to come to the project website, watch a short 15 second segment of video, and click on a simple response box (something like: “nothing here”, or “wow – creepy green fish!”) – that “annotation” then gets attached to that segment.   The cool part is you get to play a game, see interesting videos (okay there are some videos more interesting than others) of our ocean all while contributing to the scientific community.  In other words, your annotation adds value to the raw video data and provides assistance to scientific users of the database.  With a lot of visitors, each of the segments can be viewed more than once to make sure multiple people see the same thing, nothing gets missed, and researchers have a pretty good idea of what is found in that video.

Right now you are still better than a machine at being able to see what is in the video, and with the help of the tutorials, you can identify and “tag” or “annotate” what is in the 15 seconds of video.  So, what are you waiting for? Click PLAY  and see what is in our ocean and help a scientist along the way.  If you get lucky, you might even see an octopus with her babies, a ray flying through the water,  or the black smokers off the west coast of Vancouver Island.  Look what I just found…

At the end of the 19th century, a team of British archeologists happened upon what is now one of the world’s most treasured trash dumps.

The site, situated west of the main course of the Nile, about five days journey south of Memphis, lay near the city of Oxyrhynchus. Garbage mounds are always a sweet target for those interested in the past, but what made the Oxyrhynchus dump special was its exceptional dryness. The water table lay deep; it never rained. And this meant that the 2,000-year-old papyrus in the mounds, and the text inscribed on it, were remarkably well preserved.

Eventually some half a million pieces of papyrus were drawn from the desert and shipped back to Oxford University, where generations of scholars have been painstakingly transcribing and translating them. The manuscripts are rich, fascinating, and varied. The texts include lost comedies by the great Athenian playwright Menander, and the controversial Gospel of Thomas, along with glimpses of daily life — personal notes, receipts for the purchase of donkeys and dates — and the occasional scrap of sex magic.

The pace, however, has been glacial. After a hundred-plus years, scholars have been able to work through only about 15 percent of the collection. The finish line appeared to lie centuries in the future.

But a few months ago, the papyrologists tried something bold. They put up a website, called Ancient Lives, with a game that allowed members of the public to help transcribe the ancient Greek at home by identifying images from the papyrus. Help began pouring in. In the short time the site has been running, people have contributed 4 million transcriptions. They have helped identify Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plutarch’s “On the Cleverness of Animals,” and more.

Ancient Lives is part of a new approach to the conduct of modern scholarship, called crowd science or citizen science. The idea is to unlock thorny research projects by tapping the time and enthusiasm of the general public. In just the last few years, crowd science projects have generated notable contributions to fields as disparate as ecology, AIDS research, and astronomy. The approach has already accelerated research in a handful of specialized fields. And it may also accomplish something else: breaking down some of the old divisions between the highly educated mandarins of the academy and the curious amateurs out in the world.

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Here’s your chance to run with the cool kids and be one of the first people to play the Digital Fishers game.

Head on over to http://dmas.uvic.ca/DigitalFishers and give it a try (you’ll just need to quickly register on the Oceans2.0 platform first).

The instructions are kinda complicated, so pay attention:

1. Watch a short video clip.
2. If you see anything, click on the screen.
3. Select one or more items to describe what you see.
4. Save.
5. Watch another video.