This year has started off on an interesting note. I’ve, sadly, have had to abandon my reading on representing taxonomic information in biodiversity occurrence data, which I was really enjoying, because I made a commitment this month to complete a four-week short course on Sustainable AI. As I develop the scope of work for the lab I get to run, I’ve been exploring the role of artificial intelligence in biological collections. But I haven’t really been able to explore how, if, or why AI has any use cases here. And of course, there are understandable ethical concerns with using these technologies, which I have only a surficial awareness of. This course somehow simultaneously addresses these concerns and demonstrates how to sustainably use AI. Sounds really complex and complicated, and I love that kind of thing.
I’m transcribing again! After spending much of last year writing, which was wonderful, that’s now nearly done, so I get to go back to doing my “real job,” managing these collections. I’m pretty determined to dedicating one full workday each week to getting this transcription done, at which point I’m also finally applying catalog numbers to each lot. The jars are getting duplicate internal labels and temporary external labels. So far this year I’ve done this twice in two work weeks! I’ll be on medical leave for most of next month, though, so transcription (and everything else) will be paused for a while.