I Do Science

Recent testing of the IDS project development tools has revealed a gap in the design.  Suppose you are interested in tracking several birds’ nests over a period of time, and you are looking for different events?  Could you follow their progress through a season?

You create a project, and set up a data template that will record the progress of each nest.  You want to get the date of when the nest was first sighted, when the eggs appeared, when they hatched, when the babies were fledged, etc.  But this means that you would have to go back to each record and add something to it periodically.

This weakness was pointed out to us while Greg Crawford was working with naturalist Bill Hilton to create a project to track hummingbird nesting sites.  We want to thank Bill for helping us find this problem.  Since then, Greg has been hard at work creating code to allow what we are calling “stepped observations.”  These are incremental data fields that let you go back to a record you’ve created and add data to selected fields.  Ordinarily, once you’ve created a record, it would be permanent and unchangeable. But this new data field type will be very useful for wildlife observers, phenological studies, and probably a lot of other uses we just haven’t thought of yet.

When you create a project, you define fields where you will put the data, i.e., “Bird species seen” or “noon temperature” or “cloud cover”. In the IDS system, these are called “captions” and are how the fields will be labeled on the data input form. They are for the user’s eyes only.

But the system also asks you to create “reference labels.”  These are field names that will be used by the database and should be fairly short and generic.  Our programmer, Greg Crawford explains further:

“A Reference Label is used to later refer to that field - when defining a viewer, or a report, or when searching the database.  Our hope is that users will use somewhat simpler, and more universal text for reference labels than with captions so that the data in the system will be somewhat standardized.  For example, a caption might read ‘Daily Noontime Temperature’ whereas the reference label might simply be ‘temperature’.  A better example might be a caption that is in French, but we would encourage that all reference labels be in English and in the prior example, ‘temperature’ would still be used as a reference label.  This way, users could search the entire IDS dataset for data points referenced as ‘temperature’ recorded between 11:00 and 13:00 hours and in a given city (or state or country or zip code, etc).  If we can encourage the use of a set of standardized reference labels, our dataset will be that much more useful.   Compare a standard set of reference labels to just using captions…. searching for ‘Noontime temperature’ would make a search difficult if some users captioned their data as ‘Noontime Temperature’ when some used ‘Noon Temp’ while others perhaps captioned it as ‘Midday Temperature’ and others ‘Temperatura del mediodía’, etc.”

Keep these needs in mind when you set up your project data fields and are deciding what to name them.

But because certain characters are reserved or unusable by the software that drives IDS, IDS creates its own version of the data field name. So the examples above would be renamed “Bird_species_seen”, “noon_temperature” and “cloud_cover” respectively. These are the “real” field names that the system uses to refer to the data fields. I’m mentioning these now because in a future entry, I’m going to talk about how these field names are used for adding data to a project from an existing spreadsheet. This a very powerful feature of IDS that will allow people with lots of observational data to transfer that data to an IDS project.

IDoScience.net was developed to do more than just give people a place to park their observational data where others could find it and share it.  This site takes advantage of the phenomenon of “social networking”.  This means that IDS has tools that make it easier for people with similar interests to find each other.  Job seekers, hobbyists, political enthusiasts can all find other birds of a feather and flock together accordingly.

So, if you have a project on IDS, you can invite others to join, or other enthusiasts can find out about your project and ask to become part of it.  If you set up the project, as the project director you have the option to let others in–or not.

How does this work?  Let’s suppose you have a project in which you are going to watch for a few select species of birds.  Your project notes when and where you see them, what they were doing, and tracks some environmental data as well.  But now you want to expand your project.  So you can use the search features of IDS to look for people who share an interest in ornithology and perhaps ecology as well.  Contact those Research Outposts or observers using the “Invite Members” feature on the project admin page and send them a message inviting them to join your project.  Or, you can add “tags” to your project that will let others find your project using that same search feature, and send you a message asking to join.

If someone wants to join your project, you will receive a notice on your “Membership Requests” page.  This is part of your project admin page.  You can accept or reject requests to join your project.  When someone else joins your project, they can link to the page where data is added to a project.  Their location and user name will be automatically incorporated into the data they add to your project.

Adding additional users let you do real, collaborative science.  Using these features, a teacher can have his or her students participate in a project that covers the area where their students live, or it can cover several classes, a whole district, county, state… you get the idea.  So when you create a project, keep in mind that it could expand well beyond your own backyard, if you want it to.

These days, most of the best, cutting edge science is the result of group efforts.  IDS provides some very powerful tools to help potential group members find each other and get on to the business of discovery.

There are at this time two levels of membership for IDoScience.net. The first is to be an observer, and the second is to be the “Director” of a Research Outpost”. If you set up a Research Outpost, this is an account that lets you set up an observation project, and projects are the key function of IDS.

A Project in its simplest form is like a form for a database. It’s a set of fields into which you put data that you observe as part of an ongoing effort; birdwatching, weather data, seismic data, whatever. Being the proud owner of a Research Outpost gives you the ability to set up your own custom projects to capture whatever data you want.

Mandatory Project Data

Every project has some data that is mandatory and, for the most part, added automatically by the system. Your name as an observer is added to each observation in a project (using your login information). The data that the information was entered is also automatically added, although you should have a separate field for when the observation was made.

Location, Location, Location

Another mandatory data point is the location of the observation. When you set up your account, you are asked to input at least one location where you make your observations. This can be either a street address or a set if longitude/latitude coordinates. IDS requires this data so that every observation can be plotted on a Google Map. IDS even has the capability of taking many observations made at the same time but in many different places, and plotting the data as a contour map. Most users will build up a set of several locations that they can access through a drop-down menu. But you can also set up a location field that will accept ad hoc entries, such as data from a GPS unit. IDS can even take data uploaded from a GPS unit and use it to trace the path of your hike over time, and plot that on a map.

Drafting Your Project

It has been remarked that “writing is nature’s way of showing you how sloppy your thinking is.” The same can be said for developing a project. When you first create a project, you can keep it in a preliminary stage that lets you tweak this or that, add or subtract fields from your data form, and play with how you want the data displayed. When you feel that you have it right, you can “promote” it to permanent status. This makes the project unchangeable and, like the pages in a properly-kept science notebook, undeletable. Your data is as close to permanent as can be in a world of bits encoded as transitory magnetic fluxes.

Next: Expand your project.

IDoScience.net is a program designed to take advantage of the more powerful aspects of the Internet to remake the way amateur science is done.  It combines social networking with a powerful database to let citizen scientists everywhere multiply the  power of the observations they collect on all aspects of the natural world.

Although the concept as it stands here was first articulated in a white paper I wrote while working at SAS back in 2004, and later presented at the 2006 Citizen Scientist Conference, the roots of the idea go back further.  I had been working on an article on how to keep good naturalist’s field notes, which was published in the inaugural issue of Earth magazine.  During the research behind that paper I became more familiar with the work of Joseph Grinnell, a late ninteenth-, early twentieth-century American naturalist who developed a highly useful and powerful method of keeping and archiving field notes.  Of course, the one problem my article did not address was how one could share one’s findings with others.  Grinnell in fact had mechanisms in his system that made them easier to use by others, but I knew, for instance, that I had pages of notes that were useless because they were hard copy in dead storage.  For that matter, so were the notes of most nature enthusiasts.  The best one could hope for was that one’s notes could be donated to a university library or the like, but there they would probably be just as dead, just as ignored.

I was later intrigued by Forrest Mims’ “Geronimo Creek Observatory” where he makes observations and regular readings of various phenomena.  The minor brainstorm here was that anyplace could be an observatory; observers make the observatory.

Last but not least, my spouse Dr. Denise Greaves became an impassioned observer and photographer of the many species of dragonflies that inhabited the area in and around our home in Rhode Island (we have since relocated back to the San Francisco Bay Area).  She kept almost daily notes of the species she saw during daily walks around a small drainage pond near her place of employment.  It seemed only right that there be a place where she and others like her could share their observations and passion for nature.

So how does all this work?

IDoScience provides tools for members to create a “Research Outpost” (formerly called an “Observatory”).  Once your research outpost is set up, you can create “projects” which are build around a data form that you create.  Suppose you want to track the different species of birds that come to the feeder in your yard.  Or you are monitoring the health of a nearby stream, watching the family of squirrels in a hollow tree, counting meteors during a meteor shower, mapping the bird nests in your area… the IDS database is specially designed to accommodate literally anything.

As part of setting up your Research Outpost, you will add locations where you typically do your observations.  The system can accept longitude/latitude from a GPS or street addresses.   These locations go into a list you can use to geographically “tag” your observations.  Every observation has a geo-tag, and this lets IDS map the location of your data on a Google map no matter where you took your data.

IDS also accepts photos, audio files, text, and links to YouTube videos.

Now here is where things really get cool.  Once your project is up and running, you can invite others to join your project and add their observations to it.  IDS lets users sign up without having to create a whole Research Outpost; they can sign up as observers who are allowed by the person running a project to participate.  So Ms. Jones can set up a project for her elementary school class, and each of the students sign up as observers and contribute their data.  If her project lends it self to expansion, Ms. Jones can invite other classes at other schools to do the same, and before you know it she’s got a project collecting data from all over the area.

IDoScience also has a set of powerful data display tools to graph and map the data in your project.  We also have a set of standard statistical tools to help you analyze your data like a pro.

That’s the overview.  This blog will be updated regularly with new information for those who are participating in the development of this exciting new program.

Sheldon Greaves, Ph.D.

Welcome to the IDoScience.net blog.  This is where members of the IDoScience team will be posting information on the latest news and developments on IDS.  We will also be posting information from the Society for Amateur Scientists, under whose auspices this project is being developed and funded.

If you don’t already know, IDS is a place for people who observe nature to share their observations and findings with others.  Here you can collaborate, trade ideas, search for what has already been done, and display that information in useful ways.

That was the vision four years ago when first came up with this idea, and as of this writing we have reached a point where we can accept projects as a way of putting the final touches on this system.  If you have an idea for a nature study project, sign up for an account and get started.  Let us know how the system works for you, and we’ll do our best to ensure that you have a useful, productive, and above all educational experience in IDS.

Good hunting!

Sheldon Greaves, Ph.D
Creater of IDoScience.net