Culmulative transcription effort — How are we doing a year (plus) in?
Now that we have passed our one year anniversary here at Notes from Nature, it might be worth doing a little reflecting and data mining. Our favorite activities! So we decided to ask some simple questions: What are the trends in rates and cumulative activities on Notes from Nature? Do we find, for example, that projects show distinctive trends over time? Do they start hot and then settle into a comfortable groove? Maybe you have had some questions too, so feel free to ask us if you want to see a particular metric.
Below we show the cumulative transcription numbers, which should also give a fairly good idea of cumulative effort. However, we should note that each skipped record is also, at this time, counted as a transcription here, so the numbers are somewhat inflated.
Doing this simple plot yielded some (pleasant) surprises! For example, both Calbug and the Natural History Museum London (NHML) Ornithology project have shown trends of increasing transcriptions over the past months. Ornithology, in particular, is noteworthy in that the effort has really picked up. As well, this is the first time we’ve counted transcriptions for the NHML Ornithology project — when we set this one up, we focused on pages completed not transcriptions, and our current counts don’t include the work on birds. As you can see, a lot is getting done quickly on those ledgers, which is fantastic.
There are a lot of blips and bumps in the daily transcription rates, and we’d like to spend more time correlating those to things like national or international press, efforts to promote the project, new badges coming online, etc. But again, we mostly want to thank all those folks who’ve put time into the 669,666 (give or take) transcriptions on Notes from Nature. That is a herculean (collective) effort.
Notes from Nature 
I see your project says you have reached 100%! Yay! My sister and I were working like women possessed when you first began, doing over 8000 transcriptions but had to quit. So — is the project still going? I just did 2 and see the Bugs still are coming. If so, may I suggest you change that “100%” page then? Usually that means the goal is reached and the project is done, and no more help is needed so it’s a bit confusing! If there are still bugs to be transcribed you should say so…. many might just look at those stats and think the project is over (this is how other areas have done it, anyway). Thanks for all the things I’ve learned along the way 🙂
Cariel, thanks so much for this comment. We have been trying to bring order to some of the chaos that is our reporting of completion metrics. Its a longer story, and some explanation is provided here: https://blog.notesfromnature.org/2014/02/24/making-progress-clear-on-notes-from-nature/. Even with the explanation above, we still do need to be yet better. Hoping for some of that to happen in the next days and weeks and I will post an update when we have those fixes in place. THANKS for the comment because it helps us know people are looking at these measures and also want that to be 100% clear.