This post is inspired by the Pharaoh exhibition at the NGV in Melbourne, Australia. This is a beautifully displayed exhibition of objects from the British Museum, London. It has all the trappings of a modern exhibition, beautiful lighting, a custom sound track, and lots of social media coverage. But I found it immensely frustrating to visit.

Following the 2024 BHL meeting, and the departure of Martin Kalfatovic and the uncertainty the departure of such a pivitol person brings, perhaps it’s time to think about the future of BHL. Below I sketch some thoughts, which are hazy at best. I should say at the outset that I think BHL is an extraordinary project. My goal is to think about ways to enhance its utility and impact.

This blog post has some notes in support of a talk given to the Systematics Association meeting in Reading June 20th, 2024. I will post a link to the slides here once I have given the talk.

Pensoft have recently introduced “nanopubs”, small structured publications that can be thought of as containing the minimum possible statement that could be published. Nanopubs are promoted as FAIR, that is findable, accessible, interoperabile, and reusable. I like the idea of nanopubs, but the examples I have seen so far are problematic.

I’ve been down this road before, e.g. BHL, DjVu, and reading the f*cking manual and Demo of full-text indexing of BHL using CouchDB hosted by Cloudant, but I’m revisiting converting BHL page scans to black and white images, partly to clean them up, to make them closer to what a modern reader might expect, and partly to reduce the size of the image. The latter means faster loading times and smaller PDFs for articles.

How to cite: Page, R. (2024). Hugging Face Autotrain https://doi.org/10.59350/7p1n4-wdv84 These are notes to myself on using Hugging Face AutoTrain. The first version of this had a very nice interface where you could simply upload a folder of images and train a model. It was limited in the range of tasks and models, but made up for that in ease of use.

DataCite have released the Data Citation Corpus, together with a dashboard that summarises the corpus. This is billed as: The goal is to build a citation database between scholarly articles and data, such as datasets in repositories, sequences in GenBank, protein structures in PDB, etc. Access to the corpus can be obtained by submitting a form, then having a (very pleasant) conversation with DataCite about the nature of the corpus.

How to cite: Page, R. (2023). It’s 2023 - why are we still not sharing phylogenies? https://doi.org/10.59350/n681n-syx67 A quick note to support a recent Twitter thread https://twitter.com/rdmpage/status/1729816558866718796?s=61&t=nM4XCRsGtE7RLYW3MyIpMA The article “Diversification of flowering plants in space and time” by Dimitrov et al. describes a genus-level phylogeny for 14,244 flowering plant genera.

How to cite: Page, R. (2023). Where are the plant type specimens? Mapping JSTOR Global Plants to GBIF. https://doi.org/10.59350/m59qn-22v52 This blog post documents my attempts to create links between two major resources for plant taxonomy: JSTOR’s Global Plants and GBIF, specifically between type specimens in JSTOR and the corresponding occurrence in GBIF.

How to cite: Page, R. (2023). Document layout analysis. https://doi.org/10.59350/z574z-dcw92 Some notes to self on document layout analysis. I’m revisiting the problem of taking a PDF or a scanned document and determining its structure (for example, where is the title, abstract, bibliography, where are the figures and their captions, etc.). There are lots of papers on this topic, and lots of tools.