I’ll be exploring the possibility of collecting live data about bird sightings in urban surroundings. Why on Earth am I doing this?
- I want to try something different – I have been working almost entirely with text throughout my career, so adding a new modality (images) is one option
- I don’t want to be starting completely from scratch – apart from the tech stack I’ve chosen for the POC stage I have also some good experience with linked data which I’d like to build upon
- I don’t want to confine myself to screen only – I spend long enough time doing that at my “day” job. Birds present a wonderful opportunity to get out and explore the physical world, yaay!
- The kind of data I’m interested in can hardly be compiled by a single person. A local community can be of great help collecting and curating the data, and popularizing the initiative
- If the above succeeds, the resulting dataset will allow users (such as data scientists) to mine the data for insights about the interaction between birds and humans in the city; also some kind of cool visualizations may materialize, but we’re definitely not there yet