How to play

ONC's multimedia collection includes imagery, live and archived video and audio, maps, and books. 

Découvrez les pionniers et les innovateurs à l'origine de la création et de la vision de l'observatoire océanique national du Canada.

Play our ocean science observation game where volunteers help analyse ONC’s deep-sea videos.

Pêcheurs numériques

[Digital Fishers](https://data.oceannetworks.ca/DigitalFishers) is a crowd-sourced, ocean science observation game in which volunteers help analyze deep-sea videos—60 seconds at a time (no experience required!) By playing Digital Fishers you’ll help researchers gather data from video and unveil the mechanisms shaping the animal communities inhabiting the deep. 

Digital Fishers was developed by ONC together with the University of Victoria’s [Centre for Global Studies](http://www.globalcentres.org/) (CfGS) and funded by [CANARIE](http://www.canarie.ca/).

*We need your help for scientific observations.*

Our archives contain  thousands of hours of video footage recorded during installation dives and from underwater cameras installed across our subsea network. All this video needs to be studied, but our software has not (yet) become sophisticated enough to automatically identify a wide variety of animals and other features. It’s a daunting task for scientists to watch so much footage and describe what they see—but this is where you can help.

By playing Digital Fishers you can help scientists answer fundamental questions such as:
- What environmental factors influence the distribution of species in the deep?
- What is the biodiversity associated with deep-sea environments?
- How do species interact with each other and with their environment?





Play Digital Fishers

Becoming a Digital Fisher is easy. Simply visit the [project website](https://data.oceannetworks.ca/DigitalFishers) (login required), and watch a 60-second segment of video. The easy-to-use interface resembles the dashboard of a research submarine to give you the feeling of cruising about the ocean as you explore it from your computer. 

As you view you can describe what you see by selecting from the fields below the video screen. These fields include: sea life, water clarity, seafloor composition, and any other objects you see (natural or human made). There is also a comment field where you can add more information. Your “annotation” then gets attached to that video segment back at the ONC database.

Your annotation adds value to the raw video data and provides assistance to scientific users of the database. With a lot of visitors seeing the same footage, nothing gets missed, and researchers have a good idea of what is found in that video.

To progress through the levels of the game you have to complete a certain number of annotations (tags or descriptions) in order to gain “creature feature cards”. These cards tell you about an animal that lives in the ocean, which you may or may not see during gameplay. You need five cards to progress on to the next level. As the level increases so too will the complexity of your annotations as well as the number of annotations required per card. Each level also includes a tutorial showing you what to look for, so you learn as you go.

Digital Fishers, a win for scientists and citizen scientists. We invite you to give it a try!


**Contact information**<br />
For questions regarding Digital Fishers, or to request a new campaign or discuss using Digital Fishers in your classroom, please contact [Dr. Dave Riddell](mailto:riddelld@uvic.ca), Post-Secondary Education Coordinator