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, 1991 to 1997, 620 specimens between them.
1 collectors and expeditions106 days in the field67,826 km between stops339 photographed specimens
3 journeys match
Steven Perlman
9 islands · Aug – Dec 1995
Steven Perlman across 9 islands, August – December 1995320 specimens · 39 stops · 137 days · 51,778 km
Steven Perlman
4 islands of the United States · Mar – Oct 1991
Steven Perlman across 4 islands of the United States, March – October 1991189 specimens · 38 stops · 211 days · 6,398 km
Steven Perlman
7 islands · Jun – Oct 1997
Steven Perlman across 7 islands, June – October 1997111 specimens · 23 stops · 117 days · 9,650 km
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.