Digital Birdwatching in the Rijksmuseum

Author: Jasper Oosterman

Sunday October 4th, World Animal Day, 40 ornithologists, bird watchers and bird enthusiasts assembled in the library of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for digital birdwatching. These bird experts were invited to use their knowledge and skills to identify birds depicted on prints, paintings and other digital heritage objects. The event was an initiative of researchers from Delft University of Technology, VU University Amsterdam and the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), assembled in the COMMIT/ research project SEALINCMedia, together with the Rijksmuseum, Naturalis and Wikimedia.

The digital bird watching event attracted quite some media attention, both in paper media (Trouw) and digital media (RTL, Parool, Telegraaf) and was even featured on the Dutch TV news (NOS, from 10:49).

Both Rijksmuseum and Naturalis have extensive collections; The Rijksmuseum has a collection of over 1.2 million objects and Naturalis over 37 million, including many drawing and prints that depict birds. However, for many artworks the exact species of the birds are not yet known. Identifying these birds is not always easy. "Some birds can be clearly recognized", says Naturalis. "Others however require a trained eye to determine which species the artist depicted."

To support experts in identifying such species and adding description to these artworks researchers from Delft and Amsterdam in the SEALINCMedia project developed the annotation tool "Accurator" based on state-of-the-art research on Crowdsourcing and Human Computation, and Semantic Web and Linked Open Data. The Accurator tool is context sensitive, allowing people to add descriptions to parts of the artwork, and uses relevant bird datasources. This way Accurator can suggest both the common name, for example Mute swam as the general public would call it, or the biological name Cygnus olor as the expert would say.