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, 1949 to 1950, 4,180 specimens between them.
3 collectors and expeditions202 days in the field223,982 km between stops3,598 photographed specimens
3 journeys match



Yoshio KondoKay Kondo
23 islands · May – Dec 1949
Yoshio KondoKay Kondo across 23 islands, May – December 19492,551 specimens · 57 stops · 218 days · 71,593 km


Donald Anderson
22 islands · Aug 1949 – Mar 1950
Donald Anderson across 22 islands, August 1949 – March 19501,249 specimens · 70 stops · 211 days · 151,545 km



A.M. Albert Mead
7 islands of Japan · Jun – Jul 1949
A.M. Albert Mead across 7 islands of Japan, June – July 1949380 specimens · 18 stops · 42 days · 844 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.
