Roderic Page edited Introduction.md  over 8 years ago

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# Introduction  As with many fields, digitisation is having huge impact on the study of biodiversity. Many different museums and herbaria are engaged with turning physical, analogue specimens into digital objects, whether these are strings of A's, G's, C's and T's from DNA sequencing machines, or the bits obtained from a digital camera. Libraries and commercial publishers are converting physical books and articles into images, which are then converted into strings of letters, subject to the limitations of optical character recognition (OCR). Despite the occasional conflict between morphological and molecular taxonomy, there are striking parallels between the formation of DNA sequence databases in the twentieth century and the rise of natural history museums in the nineteenth \cite{Strasser_2011} \cite{Strasser_2008}. \cite{Strasser_2008, Strasser_2011}.  Viewed in this way, both classical taxonomy and genomics are in the business of digitising life. Some of the challenges faced are similar, for example algorithms developed for pairwise sequence alignment have applications in extracting articles from OCR text \cite{Page_2011}.