Animal Selfies update October 2017!

Originally posted on Talk by Ammie Kalan: 

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Hi everyone!
I’d like to take a moment to update you about the animal selfies project.
First of all, I want to thank you all for assisting me with this project by finding and tagging all camera reactions. It is a tremendous help to not only annotate the camera reactions in the classification step, but also tagging them here on Talk to allow discussions about the videos and to build tag group collections. Volunteers have already tagged almost 200 elephant camera reactions from all sites, 42 camera reactions of gorillas, more than 800 camera reactions from chimps, and many more curious baboons. This is amazing!!! We now have a solid and ever growing database for looking at how wild animals respond to camera-traps. 

As new volunteers are joining the project all the time and others might have forgotten, I want to take the opportunity to remind everyone on the purpose of this project and how you can help. I am looking into the camera reactions of chimps and gorillas (foremost) and of baboons and elephants (secondarily). I am investigating behavioral differences towards the cameras on the individual level and across different communities and sites, as well as species. The baboon and elephant data will be coded and analyzed in a second step since it is necessary to identify elephants and baboons individually (or at least to the group level) as we do it here at Chimp&See with chimps and gorillas. At the moment, this is not possible – so the apes have priority – but this will hopefully be accomplished later. Therefore, tags and videos from more sites here at Chimp&See with those four species can always be incorporated in future studies.

 I am specifically asking for your help to tag all camera reactions of these species (chimps, gorillas, baboons, and elephants) with #camera_reaction or #selfie, and to add #camtouch, if the camera is touched. An important step in this process is to also make sure that the species #chimp, #gorilla, #baboon, #elephant, and the site name, e.g., #GreenSnowflake, is tagged too.

 Thank you again for all your help! If you have any questions, please ask them here!