Journeys
The expeditions, reassembled
Every dated label is a diary entry. Read a collector’s labels in order and the voyage comes back: the islands in sequence, the days at each, the specimens from every stop. 3 journeys so far, 1975 to 1975, 975 specimens between them.
3 collectors and expeditions83 days in the field
3 journeys match
Johnson Randall
14 islands of Sri Lanka · Jan – Apr 1975
Johnson Randall across 14 islands of Sri Lanka, January – April 1975811 specimens · 56 stops · 88 days
K. Rama Rao
3 islands · Feb – Mar 1975
K. Rama Rao in Madras, India and Tuticorin, February – March 1975104 specimens · 8 stops · 12 days
Local aquarium fisherman
3 islands · Feb – Mar 1975
Local aquarium fisherman in Tuticorin, Madras and India, February – March 197560 specimens · 6 stops · 32 days
How a journey is found
Every specimen with a full date (year, month and day; a bare “1 January” is treated as a missing day) and a named collector is a diary entry. For each collector the days are read in order, each day given the place most of its labels name. The place where a collector spent more than forty percent of their days, and at least sixty of them, is home: days there are left out.
A gap of more than 21 days between collecting days ends one journey and begins the next. A journey must run five to four hundred days, hold at least forty specimens and touch at least two places. Within it, consecutive days inside the same or a neighbouring tenth-of-a-degree cell (about eleven kilometres) are one stop; the stop’s point is the mean of its labels’ coordinates, or the island’s centre when none carry any.
Companions are collectors whose own labels put them in the same cell on the same days. Staff can name a journey, write about it, feature it or hide it; those words survive every rebuild. Everything else is read off the specimens and rebuilt by harvest.mjs expeditions as the records improve.