via a process we call “taxonomic referencing.” The result is identification and mobilization of 1,068 observations from three of Henderson’s thirteen notebooks and a publishable Darwin Core record set for use in other analyses. Although challenges remain, this work demonstrates a feasible approach to unlock observations from field notebooks that enhances their discovery and interoperability without losing the narrative context from which those observations are drawn.
“Compose your notes as if you were writing a letter to someone a century in the future.”
Keywords
Field notes, notebooks, crowd sourcing, digitization, biodiversity, transcription, text-mining, Darwin Core, Junius Henderson, annotation, taxonomic referencing, natural history, Wikisource, Colorado, species occurrence records
Introduction
Our species has analyzed and documented the natural world for millennia, in media as diverse as Paleolithic cave paintings, handwritten field notes, and structured databases of sequences sampled from the environment. While structured data facilitate long-term ecological monitoring, the “first-person precision” (Grinnell 1912) of an idiosyncratic, unatomizable narrative about nature — be it a drawing on a cave wall or a handwritten page in a field journal — gives these data context that does not readily fit into a spreadsheet, and which may form the nucleus of an important new insight or discovery. Field notes in particular sit at the crossroads of these qualitative and quantitative methods; in them, structured and unstructured data are necessarily intertwined (Kramer 2011).
The observations contained in field notebooks take on particular importance given the current biodiversity crisis (Jenkins 2003; Heywood and Watson 1995; Loreau et al. 2006; Wake and Vredenburg 2008) — a crisis which threatens the fabric of ecosystems on which our own species depends (e.g. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005; Worm et al. 2006). Legacy occurrence records extracted from field notebooks provide essential baselines of past community biotic state for resurvey efforts such as the Grinnell Resurvey Project (Moritz et al. 2008; Tingley et al. 2009) and the Alexander Grasshopper Project (Nufio et al. 2010).
The growing use of such records for global change biology creates new challenges and opportunities for their digitization, transcription, representation, and integration with other sources of historical data. All these challenges ultimately depend on pulling structured data from unstructured text, while somehow maintaining a link to the original texts. Solving these challenges is key to realizing their value in research and policy-making.
Here we present a case study that makes occurrence records in field notebooks available by utilizing something of a rarity in this arena: a fully scanned and tran-
