Aside from its semi un-PC title, the Mechanical Turk is a way to obtain independent coding corroboration or content analysis, among other things. It is basically a new labor market for online tasks, and some people are subsisting on its offerings! I found this process on Yahoo Research. https://www.mturk.com/mturk/privacynotice See Profanity Use in Online Communities | Yahoo! Research for an example of a project using this method of corroboration. Sood, Antin and Churchill state that: "MTurk is an online labor market in which requesters post jobs that can be easily decomposed into a large number of small tasks. MTurk workers ("Turkers") are presented with a short description of available tasks, and then choose which tasks to complete. Individual tasks typically take between 5 and 20 seconds to complete and workers are generally paid about 5 cents for each task. Recent studies have suggested that using MTurk for similar content analysis tasks can be both faster and more economical than using dedicated trained raters [22]. Furthermore, several studies have illustrated that combining the work of multiple Turkers on the same task can produce high quality content analysis results, even when some coders do not agree (i.e. the coded data is "noisy") [2,17]." Reference Sood, S.; Antin, J.; & Churchill, E.F. (2012). Profanity Use in Online Communities. CHI 2012: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Press, Austin, Texas, USA. Retrieved from Profanity Use in Online Communities | Yahoo! Research
"...workers are generally paid about 5 cents for each task." Yeah, or maybe it can be outsourced to India for 2 cents! Oh I'm all over this! Just what we went to college for, right? Johann
If you do enough tasks, they do add up. Some Turkers live off of this system, so it must be worthwhile to some people. BTW, India is the second source of MTurk workers.
What's the first -- China? In some hardscrabble locales, people eke out a net-living in the most awful ways - like being paid to "build up" someone's Warcraft characters in skill and strength and sell them back. Or spamming forums like this... And the awful truth is - it usually pays more than those who do it could earn in the fields or factories where they live. I imagine there's some prep time for the Mturk (what an AWFUL phrase!) tasks. You have to read what to do first and that takes away from any statistical earnings averages. If there are those who actually earn $15 an hour by this drudgery/electronic piecework - then dang -- they've fully earned it. I'd bet there are many, many who don't earn nearly that... It sounds to me more of a concept for very dark, pessimistic science-fiction. William Gibson could likely do something brilliant with it. And as for the NAME! I think I could have (justifiably) been booted from this forum, had I invented it here! Johann
This might help: William Gibson - Official Website Among his many other accomplishments, Gibson launched the "cyberpunk generation" with his vision of the Internet, in his triple-prizewinning Neuromancer - the first book of his that I read. I've enjoyed several others - "Spook Country" was great! Johann
