NHM Sound Archive (Part 1): Mole Crickets

Today a paper written by myself and Natural History Museum (NHM) volunteer Yoke-Shum Broom was published in the Biodiversity Data Journal. It is the first data paper to come from the NHM Sound Archive digitisation project. The archive itself is part of the inspiration behind the BioAcoustica project (Baker et al, 2015). The paper covers the Mole Crickets (Orthoptera: Gryllotalpidae).

The paper is certainly modest compared to other forthcoming data papers on the NHM's collection of Orthoptera sounds (and even our previous paper on African cicada songs), however it is of interest due to the fact we have plaster casts of two of the species singing burrows to supplement the sound recordings.

Gryllotalpa vineae was first described by Bennet-Clark in 1970 who later, published on the acoustic properties of its singing burrow (see figure).

The existence of the singing burrow cast and the recordings has previously been limited to those with knowledge of the NHM's Orthoptera collection and those who have read Bennet-Clark's papers. To aid access (and hopefully increase interest) in these items the burrow casts we have (of Gryllotalpa vineae and also Gryllotalpa gryllotalpa) have been laser scanned. 3D models of the burrows have been made available on the NHM's Data Portal.

The paper has more details: Natural History Museum Sound Archive I: Orthoptera: Gryllotalpidae Leach, 1815, including 3D scans of burrow casts of Gryllotalpa gryllotalpa Linnaeus, 1758 and Gryllotalpa vineae Bennet-Clark, 1970.

Extension to Wikimedian-in-Residence project at the Natural History Museum

At the end of the initial Wikimedian-in-Residence project John's contract with the museum was extended to the middle of January 2014. He will be working part time (50%) on the Wikimedian-in-Residence project, funded by Wikimedia UK with the rest of his time spent on a project on the abyssal megafauna of the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone with Gordon Paterson.

The official project page on Wikipedia can be found here: Wikipedia:GLAM/Natural History Museum and Science Museum

There is some background to the project and other information on my website: Wikipedian in Residence (Natural History Museum and Science Museum)

Transcribing letters from the NHM archive using Wikisource

As an experiment John Cummings, Wikimedian-in-Residence at the Natural History Museum has made a few selected scans from the museum's archive available for transcription on Wikisource.

To familiarise myself with Wikisource I have translated the following letter from Charles Harte to Walter Rothschild. Harte worked as an impresario for Mademoiselle Paula (the famous reptile conqueror), and was offering Rothschild the chance to buy a snake from her collection.

You can read the transcription over at wikisource: Mdlle Paula, the famous reptile conqueror
(Click on the page numbers at the bottom of that page to view the transcriptions)

There is some background to this letter in this blog post on the NHM website: Item of the month (October 2011) Paula conquerors a time gone by and an old press cutting from the Otago Daily Times: Reptile Handling for a Livelihood.

Contribute

There is a list of other letters from the archive that you can have a go at translating on our GLAM project page.

Informatics Horizons: A digitial Natural History Museum in 10 years time

This was the final presentation at the Informatics Horizons event, and is a speculative look at what the digital offer of a natural history museum (not necessarily just the Natural History Museum) might look like in the future. Some key themes include not doing by hand what a computer can do for us (referring back to Vince's  presentation [video]), a closer synergy between scientists, public engagement and citizen scientists, and how we need to think - scope, scale, speed. Much of the inspiration for this talk came from Michael Edson's  talk at GLAM-WIKI 2013 (thanks!).

What will a digitial Natural History Museum look like in 10 years time? from Edward Baker

Informatics Horizons: Building Highways in the Informatics Landscape

This is the second talk I gave at the Informatics Horizons event at the Natural History Museum - which gives a brief overview of the DarwinCore Archive as a method for sharing biodiversity data and the advantages of this, primarily in supplying data to aggregators such as the eMonocot portal.





The slides are on SlideShare:

 

Building highways in the informatics landscape from Edward Baker 

NHM Informatics Horizons

Informatics Horizons is an event on biodiversity informatics at the Natural History Museum, London focussing on the museum's work in this field. I will be giving three talks (one with Vince Smith).  John Cummings (Wikimedian in Residence) at the museum will also be talking. The event will be live streamed here on the day.

Writing for Wikipedia: an introductory workshop

An event by John Cummings - our Wikimedian in Residence at the Natural History Museum and Science Museum.

Originally posted at Physics and Maths info @ Imperial College London Library: Writing for Wikipedia: an introductory workshop

This 90 minute workshop, led by John Cummings (Wikimedian in Residence at the Natural History Museum and Science Museum) and other Wikimedia trainers will involve a short general introduction to the Wikipedia projects and a discussion of how they are created and developed, followed by a more in-depth practical session involving learning the basics of editing and engaging with other contributors.
During the session, Dr Steve Cook (Senior Teaching Fellow, Biology, Imperial College London) will talk about how he uses Wikipedia with undergraduate students and Professor Henry Rzepa (Professor of Computational Chemistry, Imperial College London) will also talk about his work with Wikipedia.

This workshop is aimed at academic staff, researchers, postdocs, teaching fellows, learning technologists and postgraduate research students.

Details:
Thursday 6 June 2013
10.00am – 11.30am
Central Library, South Kensington campus, Training Room 1

To book:
If you would like to attend please email Andrew Day to book your place. Joining instructions will be sent on booking.
For further information email Jenny Evans.

John Cummings begins work as Wikimedian in Residence at Natural History Museum and Science Museum

John Cummings radio interview

Reposted from the Wikimedia UK Blog:John Cummings begins work as Wikimedian in Residence

Wikimedia UK is very happy to report that John Cummings, a long-standing and well known Wikimedian, has begun his work as Wikimedian in Residence at the Science Museum and Natural History Museum.

This is a ground-breaking partnership between two of the UK’s most prestigious cultural institutions and the charity that promotes and supports Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in the UK. His role with the museums will last for four months.

John said: “It’s a real privilege to work with institutions with such important places in the history and public understanding of science. I hope I will be able to help the museums in their goals.”

John is the co-founder and project leader for MonmouthpediA and Gibraltarpedia, the world’s first Wikipedia town and city, and he is a Wikimedia UK accredited trainer for communities and institutions.

He is also technical lead for Leaderwiki, a collaborative education resource for emerging leaders from all over the world who want to make a positive contribution in their communities.

John will be working with myself and the rest of the Biodiversity Informatics team at the NHM, as well as other staff from the across the museum. You can see what's happening here.

Visualising an archive: Walter Rothschild's correspondence

Rothschild with his famed zebra (Equus burchelli) carriage, which he drove to Buckingham Palace to demonstrate the tame character of Zebras to the public

 As part of exploring possibilities for the Wikipedian in Residence project (more on this very soon) we were given some example data from the NHM archive catalogue relating to the correspondence of Walter Rothschild to see what potential there might be for digitisation and semantic linking of content. Having data with locality and time information means only one thing: time to dig out CartoDB and Torque!

Some background to the correspondence from the Tring Museum:

Tring Museum was a natural history museum owned by Walter, later 2^nd Baron Rothschild, and which was donated to the Natural History museum in 1936.  It had been open to public since 1892. A large amount of papers, particularly letters from Walter were destroyed, so this correspondence is largely all that remains of the history of that museum.

This series is mostly letters to Walter and / or his curators Ernst Hartert and Karl Jordan, and is a fascinating collection with a wealth of information. Not only scientifically and historically

from the ornithologists and entomologists who wrote to Tring, but historically from the various institutions around the world, and also the economic history of the business of natural history, from the dealers, publishers and booksellers. There is also important social history to be studied about Tring Museum's relationship with local people and businesses, who visited, and were employed by the Museum.  The largest part relates to collectors, writing from all over the world about the expeditions they’re on and the specimens they are collecting for the museum – writing sometimes from war zones, during revolutions and uprisings, and from jungles and deserts.

Daisy Cunynghame - NHM Library and Archives

Example data:

Date	Title	Description
18 Feb - 25 Jun 1903	The Acetylene Supply Co	"6 letters from The Acetylene Supply Co., 48 Cranbourne Street and 1 Bear Street, Leicester Square, London, England, United Kingdom. 3 of the letters addressed to Karl Jordan, 3 addressed to Ernst Hartert_x000D_ _x000D_ [Was previously reference number TM/1/69/1]"
1 Apr - 17 Dec 1903	André & Sleigh Limited	"2 letters to Ernst Hartert, 9 letters to Karl Jordan from André & Sleigh Limited, Photo-Engravers, Bushey, Hertfordshire, England, United Kingdom_x000D_ _x000D_ [Was previously reference number TM/1/69/5]"

The problem with this data, from a visualisation point of view, is that the addresses are not geolocated. Manually geolocating a large number of addresses would be a substantial task, perhaps best undertaken via a crowd-sourcing approach. Making a quick demonstrator to see what is potentially possible precludes the use of such an approach in this case.

Instead the online GeoCoder tool from gpsvisualizer.com was used to process the first 1,000 records of this dataset. This failed for a large number of the locations provided, but again, as this is only a demonstrator I just ignored the rows that failed.

The following map shows the results after the geocoding.

The geocoding of a few points (many of those shown as being in North America) is clearly wrong, however the vast majority have been correctly placed, as far as is possible.

Of course geolocating just gives us a way of visualising the archive in spatial dimensions, however we also have temporal data available, so this seemed like an obvious use for Torque on top of CartoDB. The video below (best viewed at 720px and fullscreen)  shows both the spatial and temporal extent of communication.

 Obviously to be a truly useful and accurate tool the data would need more rigorous processing, which would take considerably longer than creating this demonstration (which took less than a couple of hours). It does however show that visualisation tools can be useful in developing a deeper understanding or archive catalogue data.

On a (slightly) related note...
Daisy (who provided the summary of Tring Museum and Walter Rothschild above) has also written a piece about a namesake of mine that used to work for the museum as a collector: Item of the Month (July 2012) Edward Baker - One of Tring Museum's Daring Explorers. 

Measuring the Impact of Wikipedia for organisations (Part 3)

Previous posts in this series:

• Part 1
• Part 2

As mentioned in a previous post in this series I have downloaded all of the Wikipedia pages that make a direct link to the Natural History Museum website. While this is useful in attempting to measure the impact of the NHM and Wikipedia on each other this post is a little bit more for fun at this stage (although the data was collected for an upcoming project).

An obvious thing to do with these downloaded pages is scan for them links - then build a graph of the interconnections between them. The script I set about this task is taking a while - so I decided to see what I could summarise about a topic (Wikipedia page) based on the articles that page links to. In all of these examples the numbers are the number of links from the 'subject' page to the other page.

First up is the iconic Dippy (Diplodocus):

4 | Othniel_Charles_Marsh
3 | Carnegie_Museum_of_Natural_History
3 | Sauropod
3 | Walking_with_Dinosaurs
2 | Jurassic
2 | Diplodocidae
2 | Type_species
2 | John_Bell_Hatcher
2 | William_Jacob_Holland
2 | Diplodocid
2 | Fossil

These as a set seem to be a reasonable, high-level, summary of the Diplodocus.  There is a mixture of information that is technical (type species, Diplodocid), cultural (Walking with Dinosaurs) and about the discovery, description and display of the fossil (Marsh, Hatcher, etc).

Let's go for another species, the Holly Blue

3 | Lycaenidae
2 | Eurasia
2 | North_America
2 | India
2 | http://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRpt/SingleRpt?search_topic=TSN&search_value=188523
2 | Holly_Blue
2 | Main_Page
2 | Wikipedia:About
1 | Biological_classification
1 | Animal
1 | Arthropod

This time the information is more about the biogeography and higher taxonomy, but nevertheless can be seen as a reasonable, if subjectively limited, summary of the species.


Time for something different: first up a member of NHM staff, Chris Stringer

2 | Archaeology
2 | Biological_anthropology
2 | Social_anthropology
2 | Cultural_anthropology
2 | Feminist_anthropology
2 | Fellow_of_the_Royal_Society
2 | http://www.ahobproject.org/
2 | http://books.google.com.au/books?id=wTnWJGnBwgUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Giacobini+Hominidae&hl=en&ei=jRvcS6rVJZLg7AO9_sC_Bg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
2 | http://books.google.com.au/books?id=Ke7_cl6tQ1EC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Chris+Stringer%22&hl=en&ei=JhDcS4WCF43u7APBsoiuBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false
2 | http://www.nhm.ac.uk/business-centre/publishing/det_humevol.html
2 | http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2008/march/stringer-wins-kistler-book-award.html

In short, a Fellow of the Royal Society who is an anthropologist and has written a number of books. In a purely professional sense: pretty much spot on.

So what does this kind of summary allow us to do? In a limited sense it allows us to make brief summaries of people, species and institutions that have a Wikipedia presence. But the real use comes when a large number of these analyses can be aggregated, queried and visualised. More of this another time, however here is a quick visualisation made from hacking the demos that come with arbor.js.




Full Screen Version


 
Measuring the Impact of Wikipedia for organisations (Part 3) by Edward Baker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://pblog.ebaker.me.uk/2013/03/measuring-impact-of-wikipedia-for_19.html.

A few more jobs in biodiversity informatics projects at Natural History Museum

You can find more about all jobs and apply online here.

Drupal Developer

The Natural History Museum is looking to recruit a Drupal Developer to work on the Scratchpads project (http://scratchpad.eu), which is based on the Drupal (http://drupal.org/) content management system. The role encompasses the development of content, theming and functionality for new and existing PHP and Drupal systems and applications.

Scratchpads are a web-based informatics tools written using Drupal. They allow distributed groups of biodiversity scientists to create their own virtual research communities on the Web. The successful applicants should be able to work on their own initiative and be proficient in theming, coding, configuring and doing quality assurance on Drupal based websites. Mentored training and support will be provided. You will work with members of the developer and user community (research scientists, software developers and organisations) to manage and parse biodiversity data, in addition to helping with the design, construction and testing of Drupal modules and sites. The project includes opportunities for international travel to meetings, workshops, conferences and presentations as a member of the Scratchpad development team.

A bachelor’s science degree (or equivalent) and previous experience in Drupal web development is also essential for this post.

Salary:  £37,564 per annum plus benefits

Contract: Fixed term appointment (9 months)

Closing date: Midnight on Thursday 7 March 2013


Role competences:

• A bachelor’s science degree (or equivalent)
• Previous experience in Drupal web development (version 6 and 7). We require evidence of Drupal websites that the candidate has developed.
• Hands on experience configuring Views, CCK, and other contributed Drupal modules
• Hands on experience configuring the Drupal CMS for use by non-developers to add and edit the content
• Experience with PHP, MySQL, Drupal, SQL, XML, HTML and CSS.
• Knowledge of jQuery/Javascript is highly desirable
• Experience of Linux is also highly desirable
• Experience with Drupal theming and CSS is highly desirable
• Familiarity with other programming languages (e.g Java) in addition to PHP would be useful but not essential
• Familiarity with natural history (biodiversity, taxonomy, systematics) would be advantageous but not essential

 

Front-End Developer  

The Natural History Museum is looking to recruit a Front End Developer to work on integration of the Museum collections digitisation projects. The role encompasses the design and development of the front end of a web application to interface with the Museum’s collections management system, KE-EMu, which will allow the quick and easy addition of multimedia and associated meta-data. KE-EMu is a collections management system designed specifically for natural history museums and other special collections.

The successful applicants should be able to work on their own initiative and be proficient in producing beautifully designed and intuitive web applications. Mentored training and support will be provided. You will work with members of the developer and user community (research scientists, software developers and organisations) to identify the key software requirements. The project includes opportunities for international travel to meetings, workshops, conferences and presentations as a member of the Natural History Museum’s development team.

This is a fixed term appointment for twelve months, but with the possibility of a contract extension.

A bachelor’s science degree (or equivalent) and evidence of websites and web application components that you have developed are also essential for this post.

Salary: £36,986 per annum plus benefits

Contract: Fixed term appointment (12 months)

Closing date: Midnight on Thursday 7 March 2013

Role competences:

• A bachelor’s science degree (or equivalent)
• Previous experience in HTML5 web application development
• Experience with systems analysis
• Experience working with a back end developer to produce fully featured intuitive web applications
• Extensive experience with JavaScript libraries, such as jQuery, MooTools, Dojo, Prototype, Backbone.js
• Experience working with a front-end frameworks, such as Bootstrap, Cappuccino.
• Extensive experience cross-browser testing and producing sites that conform to the WCAG 2.0
• Experience in prototyping, designing and creating clean and intuitive web application user interfaces
• Ability to produce designs that are simple, elegant and scale well across screen sizes
• Experience developing user documentation, training and application testing
• Fluent in software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks

 PHP Developer

The Natural History Museum is looking to recruit a PHP Developer to work on integration of the Museum collections digitisation projects. The role encompasses the development of a web application to interface with the museum’s collections management system, KE-Emu, which will allow the quick and easy addition of multimedia and associated meta-data. KE-Emu is a collections management system designed specifically for natural history museum and other special collections. It has a well-documented API that will enable the successful applicant to build and integrate a web application to support museum digitisation workflows.

The successful applicants should be able to work on their own initiative and be proficient in producing well-documented and tested code. Mentored training and support will be provided. You will work with members of the developer and user community (research scientists, software developers and organisations) to identify the key software requirements. The project includes opportunities for international travel to meetings, workshops, conferences and presentations as a member of the Natural History Museum’s development team.

This is a fixed term appointment for twelve months, but with the possibility of a contract extension.

A bachelor’s science degree (or equivalent) and evidence of websites and web application components that you have developed are also essential for this post.

Salary: £36,986 per annum plus benefits

Contract: Fixed term appointment (12 months)

Closing date: Midnight on Thursday 7 March 2013

Role competences:

• A bachelor’s science degree (or equivalent)
• Previous experience in Drupal web development (version 7) or extensive experience with an alternative PHP framework. We require evidence of websites and web application components that the candidate has developed.
• Experience of systems analysis and systems integration, interfacing with external services via APIs.
• RDBMS experience, ideally one or more of the following: MySQL, PostgreSQL,MSSQL
• Experience with NoSQL databases, such as MongoDB, CouchDB
• Experience working with a front-end developer to produce fully featured intuitive web applications.
• Knowledge of optimising PHP code, especially when interfacing with external services
• Experience with unit testing and systems integration testing
• Experience of command line Linux server administration is highly desirable, including knowledge of command line software like ImageMagick
• Familiarity with other programming languages (e.g. Java) in addition to PHP would be useful but not essential
• Familiarity with natural history (biodiversity, taxonomy, systematics) would be advantageous but not essential

Wikimedian in Residence at NHM (Closing date 10/02/2013)

Fancy coming to work with us?

Vacancy reference: NHM/WIR/SN
Location: South Kensington
Employment type: Fixed Term
Area of business: Life Sciences
Closing date: 10/02/2013


The Natural History Museum and the Science Museum are in partnership to recruit an experienced joint Wikimedian in Residence (http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedian_in_Residence) with a good understanding of GLAM projects (http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cultural_partnerships). As the official Wikimedian in Residence the successful applicant will be expected to make an impactful contribution to the public’s knowledge of the work of both institutions and their important and unique collections. You should have an understanding of the Wikimedia movement and Wikimedia UK’s mission to help people and organisations build and preserve open knowledge to share and use freely. You will also be expected to help develop strong and on-going links to build a long term relationship with the broader Wikimedia community and help to develop methods for assessing the impact of Wikipedia and sister projects on both institutions and the communities they serve.

The successful candidate will use their strong communication and organisational skills to promote the use of Wikipedia and sister projects to museum staff including scientists, curators and educators by fostering a broader understanding of Wikipedia (and sister projects) and arranging training in use and editing with groups and individuals. You should have an understanding of Wikimedia’s movement and Wikimedia’s UK mission to help people and organisations build and preserve open knowledge to share and use freely. In addition you will work with the museum staff to improve the quality of Wikipedia pages using items of the museums’ collections, libraries and archives and discussions with curators and researchers and act as a Wikipedia advocate through outreach to museum staff about Wikipedia’s mission and how they may contribute through workshops, events and one to one interactions.

An undergraduate degree in (or strong and demonstrable knowledge) of a scientific or technological discipline with experience of working within the Wikimedia community is also essential for this post.

Wikimedia UK is currently looking for several other Wikimedians in Residence in various cultural institutions within the UK. If you would like to find out more, please contact daria.cybulska@wikimedia.org.uk or visit http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cultural_partnerships#Wikimedians_in_Residence.

Knowledge, skills and experience:
An undergraduate degree in (or strong and demonstrable knowledge of) a scientific or technological discipline

Wikimedia UK

• An understanding of, and empathy for, Wikimedia’s movement and Wikimedia UK’s mission to help people and organisations build and preserve open knowledge to share and use freely
• Experience of editing Wikipedia or its sister websites. Supplementary training may be given
• Experience of working with the Wikimedia community
• An understanding of and commitment to Wikimedia UK’s Equal Opportunities Policies in both services to members and employment

Museums

• Good understanding of the ethos and activities (curation, research, education) of national museum
• An understanding of the GLAM sector, its culture and aims.

General

• Ability to teach and support those learning to use Wikipedia and its sister projects (including via organising events/workshops
• Ability to work tactfully, sensitively and effectively, as part of the two institutions, the Wikimedia community and with a wide range of individuals and also under your own initiative
• Ability to communicate in English clearly, both verbally and in writing to a wide range of audiences alongside use of basic numeracy
• Experience of successfully meeting deadlines
• Awareness of issues related to intellectual property, confidentiality, commercial benefit and transparent working practices.

Apply here

Measuring the Impact of Wikipedia for organisations (Part 1)

The following series of posts will be about analysing the impact and use of Wikipedia by organisations. For convenience I have used the example of the Natural History Museum (NHM), as it's the one I am most familiar with. Doing such studies on an unfamiliar organisation might prove difficult.

The linkypedia project set out to answer these kinds of questions.  A local installation of linkypedia,  with modifications, has been used to generate the statistics presented here. All links are from pages on Wikipedia to pages on the domain http://www.nhm.ac.uk/.

Measuring Impact via Page Views
One (probably flawed) measure of an organisation's Wikipedia impact is the number of page views on Wikipedia pages that reference that organisation.

 The following data are total page view from December 2007 to December 2012 (and ignores the fact that these pages might not have had links for all of this time).

Wikipedia Page	Number of links to www.nhm.ac.uk	Page views Dec' 07 - Dec' 12
Cat	1	19,958,264
Charles Darwin	1	15,323,809
Dinosaur	1	10,740,744
Horse	1	10,692,007
Great Britain	1	9,669,059
Chocolate	1	9,243,390
Tomato	2	6,756,291
Tyrannosaurus	3	6,012,785
Cattle	1	5,868,187
Homeopathy	1	5,378,978
Taxonomy	3	5,303,333
Dodo	2	5,210,713
James Cook	2	4,977,016
Nature	1	4,874,884
Pangaea	1	4,827,257
Binomial nomenclature	2	4,514,425
Moose	1	4,432,025
Giant squid	1	4,209,529
Eggplant	2	3,910,621
Largest organisms	3	3,585,714

There's a pretty good correlation between this list and things the NHM is known for, I guess some people might be surprised that homoeopathy makes the list but the link is to a debate between Peter Fisher and Ben Goldacre held at the museum.

The graph below shows that of the 13,000+ articles linking to www.nhm.ac.uk most are in the long tail of page views, and relatively few articles with links to the NHM have over 1,000,000 page views.

 Another way of measuring Wikipedia impact might be to see how many links to an organisation's website there are on pages that relate to the organisation's core activities. The following table shows the Wikipedia articles with the most links to the NHM's website.

Wikipedia Page	Number of links to www.nhm.ac.uk	Page views Dec' 07 - Dec' 12
Sematurinae	62	5,722
Wildlife Photographer of the Year	9	24,226
Chris Stringer	7	48,001
Natural History Museum	6	945,997
Nemapogon granella	6	5,996
Bumblebee	6	2,567,265
Systematic & Applied Acarology Society	5	96
Nemapogon	5	3,001
Systematic & Applied Acarology	4	209
Amastus	4	3,833
Tinea pellionella	4	23,723
Niditinea	4	1,805
Niditinea fuscella	4	3,045
Tinea trinotella	4	3,443
Tineola bisselliella	4	196,615
Monopis laevigella	4	6,212
Monopis obviella	4	2,359
Ectropis	4	6,279
Perizoma	4	6,880
Drepanogynis	4	1,492

Most of these are species or genera or months, so there is some obvious scope for improvements in other areas of study. (In fact there are a few thousand stub articles on lepidoptera that have little more than a link to a catalogue on the NHM website).  Chris Stringer is a member of NHM staff, and the Wildlife Photographer of the Year is owned jointly by the NHM and the BBC.

More results to follow.


Measuring the Impact of Wikipedia for organisations (Part 1) by Ed Baker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Drupal Developer | Natural History Museum, London

Become part of an expanding team of developers working at the cutting edge of information science and biodiversity research. The Natural History Museum London is recruiting a Drupal developer (fixed term until end of November 2013, £34,853 per annum plus benefits) to work on the Scratchpad project (http://scratchpads.eu) as part of a major effort to help researchers share and manage biodiversity data on the Web.

Key tasks and responsibilities include:

•   Development and support of Drupal Modules and Themes

•   Data parsing and content construction

•   Supporting users in the development of their sites

•   Interfacing with the user support team

Applicants should be able to work on their own initiative and be proficient in module development, theming and quality assurance. Mentored training and support will be provided. Successful applicants will work with members of the developer and user communities to manage and parse biodiversity data, in addition to helping with the design, construction and testing of Drupal modules and sites.  The project includes opportunities for international travel as part of the development team.

Applicants should have at least 1-2 years experience in Drupal development (version 6 & 7) with hands on experience configuring Views, CCK and other contributed Drupal modules. This includes working with PHP, MySQL, SQL, XML, HTML and CSS. If you have a profile page on Drupal.org, please make reference to this within your application along with Drupal websites you have developed.

For job specific enquiries contact s.rycroft@nhm.ac.uk

Absolutely, Positively, Strictly - NO RECRUITMENT AGENCIES.

For a full job description and to apply online please visit the Natural History Museum website. http://www.nhm.ac.uk/jobs

Closing date: 30th November 2012

Science Uncovered 2012

For the third year in a row the NHM will host Science Uncovered as part of European Researchers' Night.

"At Science Uncovered 350 of our scientists and visiting experts will gather across the Museum's galleries and outdoors in a fabulous show of displays, tours, experiments, challenges, discussions and more.  

This is a unique chance to interact with the latest scientific research and experience the Museum in a festival atmosphere. 

We have 6 bars and The Restaurant open on the night. Hot and cold food is available.
Our Museum in Hertfordshire joins in with its own Science Uncovered at Tring event. 

European Researchers' Night is a European Commission initiative. The Museum would like to thank the Commission for the opportunity to participate in this event."

• Science Uncovered at the Natural History Museum.
• Some stuff about what I'll be doing

Part Time e-taxonomy Support Specialist, Natural History Museum (closing today)

Become part of an expanding team of developers and informaticians working at the cutting edge of information and biodiversity research. The Natural History Museum London is recruiting an e-Taxonomy support specialist (14 month, part time, £16,403 per annum, pro rata equivalent to £27,339) as part of a major effort to help researchers share and manage biodiversity data on the Web.
Key tasks and responsibilities include:

• Run the Scratchpad helpdesk, respond to user queries
• Develop training courses and assist in their delivery
• Maintain the on-line, context-sensitive help system
• Develop a personal Scratchpad on a taxonomic topic

The successful applicant will manage the help system for Scratchpads, be the primary point of contact for user enquiries, assist in the development of user support functions and engage in outreach and promotional activities. As part of this work we encourage the successful applicant to develop a Scratchpad for their own project research using taxonomic content they have acquired through research activities. This post would ideally suit a taxonomist with practical experience managing taxonomic data and an interest in eTaxonomy. This is a part time post equivalent to 3 days per week.
For job specific enquiries contact vince@vsmith.info. For a full job description and to apply online please visit the Natural History Museum website. http://www.nhm.ac.uk/jobs

Absolutely, Positively, Strictly - NO RECRUITMENT AGENCIES. Closing date: 9th July 2012

Two new Drupal developer posts (closing today)

Become part of an expanding team of developers working at the cutting edge of information science and biodiversity research. The Natural History Museum London is recruiting two junior/mid-level Drupal developers (18 month contracts, £34,508 per annum plus benefits) as part of a major effort to help researchers share and manage biodiversity data on the Web.
Key tasks and responsibilities include:

• Development and support of Drupal Modules and Themes
• Data parsing and content construction
• Supporting users in the development of their sites
• Interfacing with the user support team

Applicants should be able to work on their own initiative and be proficient in theming, coding, configuring and quality assurance. Mentored training and support will be provided. Successful applicants will work with members of the developer and user communities to manage and parse biodiversity data, in addition to helping with the design, construction and testing of Drupal modules and sites.  The project includes opportunities for international travel as part of the development team.
Applicants should have at least 1-2 years experience in Drupal development (version 6 & 7) with hands on experience configuring Views, CCK and other contributed Drupal modules. This includes working with PHP, MySQL, SQL, XML, HTML and CSS. If you have a profile page on Drupal.org, please make reference to this within your application along with Drupal websites you have developed.

For job specific enquiries contact vince@vsmith.info. For a full job description and to apply online please visit the Natural History Museum website. http://www.nhm.ac.uk/jobs

Absolutely, Positively, Strictly - NO RECRUITMENT AGENCIES. Closing date: 9th July 2012

Simon Singh: Science and the Media: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

This years Thackray Lecture (part of the Natural History Museum Students' Conference) was given by Simon Singh, perhaps most famous at the moment for fighting a libel case against the British Chiropractic Association.

I prefer to think of some of Singh's other work, including the book and documentary Fermat's Last Theorem and The Code Book (and more recently Trick or Treatment?).

There are problems with the relationship between scientists and the media. As a scientist I find sometimes the media make some mistakes with species names, such as incorrectly identifying the world's longest insect, illustrating an article with an insect from a different order, or even getting the biology all wrong. The fact that all of these are recent papers (within a month or so) and on a small order of insects (only 3,000) species doesn't give me much confidence in the rest of science journalism, most of which is in fields where I know little (if any) more than the science-aware public.

Singh is something a bit different, a physicist turned broadcaster, author and journalist. The first part of the talk covered his documentary Fermat's last Theorem (watch online here). As well as explaining some interesting techniques he used, there were a few confessions - including the editing of the words said by one mathematician. This caused outrage from a few colleagues, but in all fairness I believe it was a valid alteration. It did not change the meaning (or significance) of what was said, but removed the need for explaining some mathematics that was not important to the story being told.

I don't think this in itself was a problem for anyone, but the fact the words were changed without the permission of the orator certainly divided opinion. If the meaning had been changed I too would have felt very uncomfortable, but I believe the change made for a better documentary and did not compromise the mathematics. But it does highlight the fact that in hands less skilled or scrupulous than Singh's people can easily appear to say things that they didn't mean.

The latter part of the talk focused on the BCA case, which I believe has been covered quite extensively elsewhere, by people who have followed it more closely.

Uncluttered Tube Map

Telling us what we always knew but never wanted to admit. People don't come to the Natural History Museum to look at insects, instead they want to see some statistical blips incapable of surviving beyond the K-T boundary. One day, they will learn.

Tourist Tube Map from The Londonist.

Roy Davies and The Darwin Conspiracy

During a brief down-time moment in Champaign, IL I have discovered something that I wrote a few months back and did nothing with. Roy Davies, author of The Darwin Conspiracy, came to talk to the staff of the Natural History Museum, London. I jotted down some thoughts after the event, so here it is, not particularly timely, but hey!

I imagine that Roy Davies was just a little nervous sat before the assorted staff of the NHM. Evolution is part and parcel of their trade. In fact, the process of evolution and one of its results, speciation, is what they study. To accuse one of its founding fathers, Charles Darwin, of fraud (essentially stealing his ideas from Alfred Russel Wallace) may be considered a heresey.

Although heresy was not the mood in the room when Davies had finished, and nor should it have been. Surprise was certainly present in some, but for the majority it was probably curiosity. Davies gives his sources, and until those who weren't totally familiar with all of them had checked them his claims cannot be discredited. I don't have a thorough enough background in Darwin's works and letters to even begin to formulate a reasoned response. Neither do many of the countless people who will criticise Davies for attacking a person who to them embodies reason and science (and to many also atheism).

I would like however to welcome Davies, a TV hack and journalist, to the world of skepticism and reason. We believe that any idea is open to criticism and review. Darwin's contribution to evolutionary theory is one of those ideas. Davies has read more of Darwin's works than many of Darwin's defenders. Science should not be threatened by Davies' ideas. If they are wrong they can be disproved. If they are right the history books must be re-written. So what? It shows that is the scientific method is applied to the history of science then reason prevails.

One thing that did come out of the event was a near-universal view that Alfred Russel Wallace made a significant contribution that is being increasingly overlooked.