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I am a big fan of infographics and generally good presentations of data. Nathan Yau’s site, Flowing Data, is an excellent place to pick up new ideas, tutorials and to be entertained (see also Nathan’s take on the Bristol Stool Chart).

Working on a taxonomic catalogue can get very dry and for a non-taxonomist it looks incredibly boring. Traditional printed catalogues are the foundation of most biological studies (the intricacies I may go into another time) but now we are starting to make entirely digital catalogues. When our online Coreoidea catalogue is finished I hope to produce some interesting representations of the data. One of the potential ideas would be a heatmap for worldwide species distribution, looking similar to this map for “touristiness” (seen on Flowing Data):

"World map color-coded by level of touristiness, based on analysis of photos on Panoramio. Yellow indicates high touristiness, red medium touristiness, and blue low touristiness. Areas having no Panoramio photos at all are grey. " By:-www.bluemoon.ee

I think data visualisations and infographics need to be used more often as they can provide information in an accessible way. The first topic in this year’s Reith Lectures will be “The Scientific Citizen” by Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society. Rees will discuss how scientists need to do more in helping the public understand scientific issues that affect us all, rather than relying on the government and the media. I am certain that good visualisations and infographics will play an important part in delivering good science to the public.

The first Reith Lecture will be on Radio 4, Tuesday 1st June at 0900.

I am a fan of Flickr and think it’s a wonderful place to store and tag photos. Recently I’ve been wondering about how useful Flickr is as an entomological resource and thought of a few questions:

• How many new insect photos are being added daily?
• How common are misidentifcations?
• How many insect photographers add geographic data (geotags)?
• What is the number of unique insects represented on Flickr?
• How could Flickr be used in an insect-based meta-analysis?

As I wrote this there were (searching everyone’s uploads with no filter):

• 839,123 results for ‘insect’
• 28,014 results for ‘hemiptera’
• 1,673 results for ‘pentatomidae’
• 816 results for ‘palomena prasina’

Flickr map of Palomena prasina © Yahoo 2009

I found that there have been around 1,000 extra hits for insect everyday in the past week and that searching for ‘palomena prasina on the Flickr map gave ~217 results (depending on the type of sort) which were spread around the UK, France, northern Spain, Germany, Finland, Belgium and the Netherlands.

As I browsed through general search results for the Palomena prasina photos, I saw a few that were obvious misidentifications. I think that misidentifications are probably the biggest limiting factor that would be hard to control if you wanted to use Flickr tags/information in an academic way. Whilst there are plenty of very knowledgeable Flickr entomologists, it’s hard to know which photos are identified correctly.

Whilst the map search was interesting, it wasn’t overly useful in it’s basic form. I think that a more sophisticated map search might be possible using of the Flickr API, but you would still be limited by the proportion of images that have geographic data.

Finally, everyone tags and organises their photos differently. I try and enter in as much information as I can without it being too long or bothersome. For an insect shot I try and include: country, county, area name, specific location (like the nature reserve), class, order, family and genus+species. By doing this I can search for particular insects in different areas quite easily. I started added a few six-figure grid references to the images, but as every specimen has a map location, this isn’t a priority for me.

I feel that Flickr could be used in a more powerful way and have a few ideas how, but I’ll save that for another post.

For now, why not check out some of the Flick insect groups? I’ve linked a few below:

• British Bees, Wasps and Ants
• British Beetles
• British Bugs
• British Flies
• British Lepidoptera
• Fly Day Friday
• UK Orthoptera

I’ve always seen the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a bit old and outdated, and it’s certainly never been my first choice for general reading or research. As a student I was aware that Wikipedia was not deemed academically suitable, but in December 2005 Nature published a report that compared the science articles of Wikipedia with those of Britannica. It summarised that whilst Wikipedia was not quite as accurate, it was close.

Britannica objected to the study in a 20 page response published on the internet, claiming it was “wrong and misleading”. Nature responded, stating “We reject those accusations, and are confident our comparison was fair”.

Now Britannica is emulating Wikipedia by allowing its readers to contribute to articles with the launch of its new site. Will this be enough for the old encyclopaedia to keep competing with Wikipedia? I can’t imagine that Britannica will ever get the immense userbase that Wikipedia has but if Britannica could attract knowledgable readers to contribute and their assessing experts do their job properly, it might work.

Currently I don’t have many positive things to say about Britannica’s entomology articles: compared to those in Wikipedia they are completely devoid of references and often have a helpful pop-up to remind you that you’re looking at an Premium article for which you need to pay £4.99 a month.

As someone who has recently left university I find it harder to access journal articles and specialist books, although I’m lucky to have friends who do.  Thankfully more and more entomology groups are getting their knowledge online, allowing the amateur, enthusiast and professional easier access to the resources they need. Whilst I might check Wikipedia for general information, I think I’ll be using sites like the Dipterists Forum and Species File more often in the future. Unfortunately the specialist sites are relatively unknown compared to Wikipedia and Britannica and the first stop for people searching for information on insects will probably be Wikipedia.

If you were going to contribute to either encyclopaedia, which would you choose?