Finished! Looks like this project is out of data at the moment!
Thank you so much to everyone who participated in Sedimental Values! All of these pages are now transcribed.
FAQ
What is the purpose of this project?
This project will record 40 years of fossil field data from Pit 91 at the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits. It will allow the Museum to plan for preparation and curation of future collections. In turn, this will inform our curators, students, and visiting paleontologists about what was living in the LA region over the past 50,000+ years. Then, they can ask Paleoecology research questions such as the timing and abundance of botanical communities in the past and how they responded to changes in climate over long time scales. Answers to these questions will illuminate the prehistory of the La Brea Tar Pits and southern California as a whole.
I noticed the images appear cropped and that there are gaps on some pages. Why is that?
This is because the images were taken from field notes written by paleontologists who, in some cases, are still living or working at the Tar Pits. Field notes typically contain sensitive and personal information about researchers. To protect their privacy, all personal notes and entries not pertaining to specimen findings are redacted from public view. This is why in some cases it appears as though information is missing from a page.
Can I change my classification if I realized I did something wrong? Will it mess up the data?
You can cancel an in-process classification by clicking on the small "X" next to the box you drew around a specimen measurement. You can also go “Back” while in process and redo or re-assess your work. Once you click "Done" you can't change your response. However, don't worry about it! The images are seen by several people. If there is a mistake, your incorrect answer will be outweighed by people's correct answers or there will be enough discrepancy among answers that members of the research team will look at the images.
Am I able to choose what image I classify?
For quality assurance purposes, images are shown at random to volunteers.
What happens after I classify an image?
Each image is classified by 4 different people. Once you and others classify all images, the research team will examine any disagreements in particular images. Then results will be run through a consensus program to identify a "final version" of the data to be entered into the Tar Pits' specimen database.
Why aren't these measurements in metric units?
Feet and inches are used for these units to be consistent with periods of excavation activity earlier in the 20th Century.
Why can't a computer do this project?
While OCR (optical character recognition) software has greatly improved and could do a relatively good job on some of the pages in this collection, earlier pages in the collection (from the 1970s and 1980s) would be very difficult for a computer to recognize, and would necessitate a great deal of manual clean up. Furthermore, because we are hoping to parse the data into specific fields, therefore making it more usable for future researchers, this is much easier to have people to do than to have computers do.
What if I have other questions that aren't in the FAQ or in the Tutorial?
Ask us in the Talk section! We will do our best to answer any questions you have. If you have a question or concern unrelated to a classification, the research team can also be contacted at rlb-zooniverse@umich.edu for further inquiry.