Dr. Thomas Hegna
Department of Geology and Environmental Sciences Associate Professor Thomas Hegna will be an instructor at a summer workshop hosted by Paleobiology Database (PBDB), an online database that aims to document diversity through all of geologic time.
The workshop, to be held at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, July 15 to 19, is intended to help students and early career paleontologists become involved in the collaborative database. Individual contributors enter data from published scientific papers that increase the coverage of the database.
Dr. Hegna's role in the workshop will be to help teach students about tools to use to help them utilize data in scientific papers written in languages they do not speak or read. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and Google translate figure prominently in the toolkit. Being able to enter non-English language papers helps ensure that the database is truly global.
