Evolution 2013 presentation, notes and slides
Our pilot study worked! Over a dozen Mechanical Turk workers helped to digitize our pilot study sample of fishes. For more details and results, check out the slides I presented at Evolution.
This was my first year attending Evolution, and it was exciting showing my work with the Encyclopedia of Life to an amazing group of scientists. I got lots of great feedback from people interested in my idea and methods. Based on this feedback, the next larger experiment is going to incorporate a semi-landmark approach, where workers will outline a shape, such as the curve of the dorsal fin that then gets subsampled down into a series of points. Additionally, the study will include a much larger number of landmarks, particularly those that more closely correspond to functional and performance aspects of fish anatomy. These are steps that I plan to take after discussions with several people, including Matt McGee and Thomas Claverie of the Wainwright lab, and Bruno Frederich, a visiting scholar in the Alfaro lab from the University of Liege.
I’m currently working hard on writing the code and protocols for the next study. As always, all of the study materials are freely available online at GitHub