Planet Four Talk

Dealing with large numbers of fans

  • wassock by wassock moderator

    At ZooCon I had a brief chat with Chris about the 'turnoff' factor of having to mark large numbers of objects. In the past I did a lot of work on particle size distributions using a graticule to control the number of particles counted. The BS graticule used looks like this

    enter image description here

    The basic ideabeing that you count within the box which contains, say, 20 particles. Not directly Transferable as on Mars we dont have an even distribution. But if there could be a way of greying out a Chunk of the image So that the people who opt to only do a part image collectively still see the whole thing it would work.

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  • p.titchin by p.titchin in response to wassock's comment.

    I don't mind marking lots of objects, the' turn off' for me is that I know the page will become unresponsive before it is finished, and the time spent on the image is lost. As I understand it, if the 'finished' tag has not been clicked on, then the information marked is lost. I have got better at spotting the signs of imminent unresponsiveness now and usually manage to bail out and 'finish'. This feels unrewarding though, and so it would really be great if a way round this could be found. Perhaps even a simple 'graticule' tool in which a count of fans could be put with predominant direction if there was one?Looks to be a tricky one though.

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  • Sylverone by Sylverone

    I think breaking down those very dense fields somehow is a really good idea. As I recall, the Milky way project uses zoomed-in images to allow people to mark bubbles that were too small to mark in the full sized images that the project originally used. A similar method could be used here.

    For instance, there could be a button labeled "more than X blotches and fans", where X is the number at which you want to divide up the work. If enough people clicked that button, the image could be divided into sections (probably quadrants) which would then be presented as individual images to people during a future iteration of the project.

    Another possibility is to present the same "more than X blotches and fans" button, but in this case the button would bring up a multiple choice question, "about how many are there?" like Snapshot Serengeti uses, along with the question, "Which direction do they seem to be mostly facing?" along with a "compass" that the user can mark the direction or directions with.

    Anyway, just ideas. Maybe these have already been thought of, since the problem's been around a while. I suppose at this point the scientists have chosen to leave the interface as-is and see how it affects the data?

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