Noë

[oldnick]

Help! I was really pleased to Hallucigenia's detective work on Friedrich Wilhelm Noë - see sheet http://herbariaunited.org/specimen/300868/ This label was very familiar to me! Having spent ages previously trying to match a similar one to anything! There are several specimens from this guy, scattered at disparate places around the menu, and my request is, can these be unified / cross-referenced to one name?? . 2 complications - on his labels, the name is spelt with the French acute accent, not the double dot; and he should also be findable with no accent due to the impossibility of inputting accents with keyboards. His labels are very brief, with a barely legible entry which may be a country name (France? Fiume? what country is Fiume in?) or a habitat type in Latin. One difficulty is finding his current specimens - there are at least 3-4 on H@H, at present I can only find one other of them! http://herbariaunited.org/specimen/296336/ At present, both the above have the wrong country entered.

[oldnick]

More leads from H@H:
http://herbariaunited.org/sheets/BIRM/25836.jpg
http://herbariaunited.org/specimen/278894/
http://herbariaunited.org/specimen/297465/
http://herbariaunited.org/specimen/293208/
http://herbariaunited.org/specimen/272443/
qgroom wrote, Perhaps from Frank de Noé, vicomte de Noé (? - 1871?).
Hallucigenia's info from sheet http://herbariaunited.org/specimen/300868/ : The standard author abbreviation Noe is used to indicate Friedrich Wilhelm Noë (18?? - 1858), German botanist. Worked as pharmacist in Fiume and later as director of the Galata - Serai botanical gardens in Constantinopel [Istanbul]. From www.flowersinisrael.com/Crepissancta_page.htm
Hallucigenia's original source (as I have traced it, http://www.fritillariaicones.com/icones/kurdica.html ) reads:
' Fritillaria kurdica was described by Boissier from specimens collected by Noë near Lake Van in the late 1840’s. Friedrich Wilhelm Noë, an Austrian, was born in Berlin in 1798. In 1844 he settled in Istanbul and became director of the Botanic Garden of the Êcole Impériale de Médicine de Galata Serai. Most of his expeditions were made in the years up to 1854, and he died in Istanbul in 1858. The school at Galataseray, now Galatasaray Lise, was founded by the Sultan Beyazit II in the early 16th century, as the palace school for royal pages and future administrators of the Ottoman empire, initially drawn from the sons of Christian captives, but later including Turkish boys. ' (ie his dates 1798 - 1858 and Austrian).

[oldnick]

Additional Noe specimens:
http://herbariaunited.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4725
http://herbariaunited.org/specimen/305584/[/u]

[oldnick]

Basic issues now resolved hopefully - see http://herbariaunited.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4725

[Chris Liffen]

and odd notes at
http://herbariaunited.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4443

[johned]

In an earlier post Oldnick bemoaned the fact that so many collectors are present in a multitude of forms, ranging from the full name with full forenames and dates of birth and death right through to surname only or (even worse) initials. I have done a small experiment to disambiguate a collector with only a few variants, and it seems to me that if you edit individual specimens to replace a shortened version (with initials only) by the full name & dates, then future searches will display only the full name and not the previous shorter version. But is this really true? - i.e. is the shorter version, the one appearing on the specimen label, still there in the database to be searched for?

This is clearly an inefficient and laborious way of tackling the issue, but it does have the virtue of ensuring that one actually examines the labels for clues such as handwriting rather than doing a global edit which runs the risk of replacing correct, albeit incomplete, info by erroneous full names and dates.

Software that provides a way of searching multiple fields might offer a better route to cleaning up collectors' info by linking it with collecting localities, but we then run up against the lack of definitive sources against which to validate the names (since Desmond's Dictionary, in particular, has lacunae which are reflected in the H@H listings). Future users of the database may be able to cope, as they may well have a clearer idea of how to distinguish near-synonymous collectors' names because they can access improved genealogical sources of data.

I still think, on balance, that it is better to plough ahead with capturing data from the next 100,000 specimens than to get side-tracked by the holy grail of 100% cleaned-up data.

[oldnick]

As in so many cases, many Noe sheets have now come to light and been correctly entered, thereby elucidating their obscure area of origin; Noe was evidently regarded as a significant and interesting botanist. H@H's scientific validity would be lost in pursuing a holy grail of digitising all the millions of herbarium sheets in a single lifetime.....