PlotCritic is a user-friendly and easily deployed tool for image scoring based on user-defined questions and answers. If you use PlotCritic, please cite https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article/7/7/giy064/5026174
PlotCritic is available from Conda:
conda install -c bioconda plotcritic
Run the following command (substituting your own fields):
plotcritic \
-p tmp \
-i imgs/ \
-q "What is love?" \
-A "b":"Baby don't hurt me" "d":"Don't hurt me" "n":"No more" \
The arguments used above are:
-p
A project name (must be unique). Required.
-i
A directory of images (may also contain .json metadata files). Required.
-q
A curation question to display in the website for scoring images.
-A
The curation answers to display in the website for scoring images (must follow the example above, with a one-letter code and an answer for each entry, separated with commas and separated from other entries with spaces).
-s
PlotCritic is designed to work well with Samplot-generated images, which can include extra metadata in .json files. to take advantage of this, PlotCritic has the additional option to add Samplot-oriented reporting and summary fields with the -s
argument.
-R
Allows user to customize the fields included in reporting. These fields must also be included in a .json metadata file matched by name to the image file.
-S
Allows user to customize the fields included in summary report. If this is set, -R
must be as well and these fields must be a subset of the -R
fields.
plotcritic -h
The above command will create a local html website in a directory with the name of the project. Open the index.html file in that directory with your browser of choice to score images. Navigate to Score Images
and set a username to begin.
Click the answer buttons or press indicated keys to respond to the curation question for each image. When finished, download a report. Do not refresh or close the page before downloading report or scoring will be lost.
Navigate to View Report
and upload any number of scoring report files to generate a report.
The summary report is the same as the web report (one record per image), while the complete report contains each score (one record per user per image).
One major goal of PlotCritic is easy scaling to many curators. Version 1+ of PlotCritic simplifies this, with two main methods of sharing.
Method 1: A project leader creates a website as a directory via the plotcritic
command and shares the directory with other users (via email, for example, as a compressed file, or direct transfer by USB drive). Users open the website locally and score images as described above, then return the downloaded scoring report to the project leader for report generation. This method maintains full security, no data is ever placed in public internet locations or available outside the team.
Method 2: A project leader creates a website as a directory via the plotcritic
command and uploads the directory to a hosted server, giving the server URL to users. Users open the website locally and score images as described above, then return the downloaded scoring report to the project leader for report generation. This method is less secure, but may be appropriate and convenient for some projects with lower data security protocols.