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(Updated Feb 18th) Thanks for your patience -- more handwriting images will be coming next week!
Transcribe Botany labels to help a computer learn how to read handwriting using AI
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Message from the researcher
With millions of scientific herbarium specimens globally, humans and machines can complement each other to help accelerate the pace of discovery and documentation of plant diversity on Earth! - Dr. Matt von Konrat
Humans and Machines: Deciphering Herbarium HandwritingAbout Humans and Machines: Deciphering Herbarium Handwriting
Julian A. Steyermark was a prolific botanist -- he collected over 130,000 plants during his career! Many of these plants were dried and mounted on herbarium sheets, and information about these specimens was recorded in his handwriting.
Project volunteers will help us to create a training data set, which will be used to "teach" a machine learning program how to understand Steyermark's handwriting. This program uses cutting-edge AI techniques which have been proven to work well on other handwritten text.
Our pilot study has achieved promising results, and we hope to dramatically speed up the digitization of scientific text, so that it can be made available to scientists around the world. Access to this information can help researchers understand global biodiversity and track changes in species over time.