Background

As part of a CANARIE Inc. funding award to NEPTUNE Canada for its "Data from the Deep, Judgment from the Crowd" proposal, the "Digital Fishers" crowdsourcing component represents a joint project of NEPTUNE Canada and the University of Victorias Centre for Global Studies (CfGS). Co-investigator Dr. Rod Dobell leads the involvement of CfGS with additional support from eBriengs.ca.

Project Update
In order to reach the project objectives of involving large numbers of participants in the Digital Fishers endeavour, an intuitive and attractive web interface allows volunteer Internet-based users the ability to view short segments of NEPTUNE Canada video imagery and apply human reasoning, processing and computations that are then usable by the science community.

Digital Fishers focuses on the application of In this joint project of the Centre for Global science-oriented crowdsourcing, or Web2.0Studies and NEPTUNE Canada, a milestone was enabled citizen-science to the unique problem passed with the completion by the DMAS of how to effectively assess the large volume software development group of a beta test of visual and audio data version of the Digital streaming in from the Digital Fishers is an effort to apply the principles Fishers interface and the seaoor observatory - of crowdsourcing to the NEPTUNE Canada video move to usability data which is still largely testing. The CfGS group stream. Through the creation of a web-based undecipherable by completed an internal game-like interface, the objective is to get current machine heuristic evaluation with computation methods - volunteers to watch a short segment of NEPTUNE a report to DMAS in without applying highlyMarch 2011 following Canada video and add a descriptive tag. skilled, scienticallywhich usability testing trained human resources in repetitive tasks was carried out in May 2011. A report that require very little training. We take our submitted to DMAS provided the basis for inspiration from previous crowdsourcing / further interface and system renements as we citizen science exercises such as NASA work towards a full Digital Fishers release. Clickworkers, and emerging leaders like Zooniverse. Following revisions to the interface based on this usability testing, operational deployment The objective of this component is the creation is anticipated in July 2011 with additional of a crowdsourcing platform that engages revisions through the July-September period as large numbers of volunteers to provide a informed by ongoing user feedback. During feedback loop from the database through the that time, CfGS will also develop plans and collective mind of the crowd and back to the complete arrangements for a formative database. This activity can enhance the evaluation to be carried out over the content of the database and add value to the SeptemberNovember period. This evaluation raw data, providing assistance to scientic will address issues of quality assurance and users of the database. While our primary targets for numbers of annotations as well as objective is the creation of a workable and user satisfaction questions and related engaging interface, the project also has a feedback addressing possible future number of research questions centred on the development of the interface and the overall challenge of effectively applying crowdsourcing approach. crowdsourcing to those elements in a highvolume data stream not optimally amenable to this is like Wikipedia - I machine computation but of such scale that it is resource-prohibitive to employ enough qualied people to do so. This approach would seek to tap the cognitive surplus of large numbers of dispersed volunteers to improve the value of the data to the scientic community and, subsequently, the quality of the evidence provided by the scientic community as a basis for public discourse. like the idea of pooling together knowledge through simple observation - a comment from usability testing - May, 2011

Digital Fishers Release Date: Summer 2011. Follow the project:

Web: www.digitalshers.net Twitter:@digitalshers Email: digitalshers@gmail.com