ABS Historian, Sue Margulis
As the start of the fall semester approached, I spent some time cleaning and organizing my office. While I have long since gotten rid of the fortran punch cards I used for data analysis nearly 40 years ago, I still have binders of paper data sheets, mini video cassettes of behavior, 5 ¼” floppy disks, and 35mm slides. The change in technology, and how we collect, store, and manipulate data, has progressed at a mind-numbing speed. I clearly remember the first research study I participated in, as an undergraduate at Bucknell University. To signal our point data collection, I first sat in an office for an hour with a small cassette tape recorder, staring intently at my watch. Every minute, I said “beep.” That recording was my cue – collect a data point on my focal animal at that moment. I used a “ditto” machine to run off copies of my data sheet; I calculated behavior durations by hand. It would be another decade before personal computers (dual floppy) became common, and another 10 years before email became common place. It is a bit mind-boggling that we were able to function and be productive researchers, and even more amazing to think how much has changed in a relatively short time.
Our ability to rapidly, accurately, and easily, collect data is impressive. In addition to the simple ability to enter data directly into a computer, many tools have emerged to make our work easier and more interdisciplinary. I could run through a litany of the event recorders and related devices I have used over the years, and many of you may remember these fondly (or with disdain): the Osborne OS-3, the Psion, the Palm Pilot. Now of course, any cell phone or tablet can serve as a reliable and easily transportable event recorder, with many choices of software available. Photographing or video recording behavior for later analysis has also gotten far easier. Gone are the 8mm films, VHS tapes and 35mm slides. Instead, we can record action directly on electronic devices, remotely using camera traps, or even more remotely using RFID data loggers and proximity detectors.
That said, many of us may still have huge amounts of non-digitized information – be it data, images, video, or audio. While data sharing and archiving may be the norm today, that has not always been the case, and much data may remain largely inaccessible. What do we do with this information in order to make it more accessible? How much of this information do we save? How do we convert and digitize this information into accessible and useful forms? Certainly pages of data can be scanned, cassettes and video recordings can be digitized, but the time needed to do this is extraordinary.
Historically, the Animal Behavior Society has maintained an archive at the Smithsonian Institution. Up until the mid 1990’s, one of the tasks of the ABS historian was to archive all correspondence and materials and deliver this to the archive at the Smithsonian. As far as I can tell, this still exists, in the form of 78 boxes of paper files, from the first days of the Society in 1964 through 1994. This includes everything from hard-copy manuscript reviews to hard-copy election results, from letters between ABS Executive Committee members to Society resolutions. Will this material be useful or needed in the future? That is difficult to say, but in its current form, it would be quite challenging to sift through.
When I became the ABS Historian in 2022, the outgoing historian, Zuleyma Tang-Martinez, handed me an envelope. In it was a cassette tape of an interview with Konrad Lorenz from 1975. She had this converted to a CD – since no one has a cassette player any more. I plan to have this digitized but…what do I do with it?
While we are familiar with the many data archives available to us, numerous other sources exist to find tidbits of information. The Macaulay Library of Animal Sounds (https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/) provides access to a huge collection of audio and video files. While most of the library focuses on bird song, one can find vocal recordings of other species, as well, and a growing collection of video and photographic material. At present, the library includes over 1.9 million audio files, over 50 million photos, and over 265,000 videos. Xeno-canto (www.xeno-canto.org) is another archive, focused primarily but not exclusively on birds, containing almost 800,000 audio files and spectrograms. Youtube (www.youtube.com) is often an excellent source of video clips, suitable for use in classes, but with limited curation, it may be difficult to validate specific items. Over the past several years, the Animal Behavior Society has maintained a Youtube channel that primarily includes conference presentations and interviews. Efforts to create an ethogram archive have come and gone over the years, and at present, none appear to be active. These include ethograms.org, ethotrak, ethosearch, ethosource, and ethobank (the last four of these initiated by members of the Animal Behavior Society). Efforts to establish an animal behavior section as a part of the Eco-Ed Digital Library of the Ecological Society of America (www.ecoed.esa.org) did not have enough input to make it a viable option.
Over the years, the idea of having ABS start an archive of rich media has been explored, but the challenge of curating and maintaining such an archive have remained an insurmountable hurdle. A recent request from NYU graduate student Melinda Jackson ([email protected]) to the Society may provide an avenue to archive some historical rich media (and I encourage you to reach out to her if you have any rich media to share):
I’m currently working on a documentary project exploring the film and video material generated by animal behaviour research. I believe this type of material has huge value as an archival record and also has the potential to present viewers with an alternative perspective on non-human animals not necessarily conveyed through traditional narratives.
If anyone has access to such footage from your research, I would love to take a look. Alternatively, if you have any leads on related historical archival collections I would be equally interested!
At this point I’m just getting a sense of the lay of the land and am open to watching any raw or edited material, regardless of length and image quality (sound-only files are encouraged too). Please note that I would not use or release any material without the appropriate permissions.
Peruse your own archives, book shelves, and file cabinets. How much analog information do you have? Is there a way to make it more broadly accessible? As our discipline has changed and grown over the years, we do sometimes neglect the historical information that has been compiled the old-fashioned way: paper and pencil, 35mm slides and images, 8mm film. Particularly in light of the increasing impact of climate change on our planet and on our biodiversity, some of this material could prove to be invaluable as we explore the growing anthropogenic impacts on the behavior of the species with which we share this planet.