All posts tagged with biostor

Unpaywall finds (legally) open access versions of paywalled literature. Thanks to the work of Richard Orr, Unpaywall’s Lead Developer, BHL is now one of the sources indexed in Unpaywall’s database. As of this week, 43,000 journal articles on the BHL website are now discoverable via Unpaywall.

The story of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History (CMNH) begins in the 1830s, when a small group of men filled a two-room wooden building in Public Square, downtown Cleveland, with mounted animals. This building was known as the “Ark,” and the men who gathered there, united in their passion for natural history, were called “Arkites.” The Arkites were led by William Case, who would later become mayor of Cleveland. He, his brother, and his father had used the Ark as a place to retreat from work, and in the absence of any other museums in the city, it became a hub for all kinds of collection and research. In 1876, the Ark was relocated to Case Hall.

This week, we feature one of our users that has been extraordinarily active in not only using BHL content, but in creating applications that significantly enhance the information and knowledge that can be gleaned from our resources. The creator of BioStor and a huge player in the realm of biodiversity informatics, meet Dr. Roderic Page!

On December 16, 2010 Science released a paper, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books” that describes data mining research using a vast textual archive created by the Google Books. The abstract reads, “We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of “culturomics”, focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. ‘Culturomics’ extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.”