Following Mechanical Turks
Articulating the Human in "Human Intelligence Tasks"
Most Recent Episode:
Regular video discussions every other Friday at 9:00 a.m. Eastern. Next video discussion July 2.
This Enculturation: Intermezzo research project analyzes Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) job posts—called Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs—to trace how they rhetorically depict human actants.
The project is an experiment in open, ad hoc scholarly collaboration among multiple humans and non-humans. It is unfolding through regularly scheduled public streaming video sessions as the principal investigators (Jeremy Tirrell and Nathaniel Rivers) move from initial concept to completed text. Anyone can participate in these discussions, and several of them include invited guests as the work uncovers issues that would benefit from particular expertise. Video sessions and associated materials—textual exchanges, research documents, relevant links, etc.—are archived here and publicly shared. The manuscript draft is available online during development and is open to in-progress annotations, with the hope that they will genuinely shape its direction, rather than function as post factum comments on a stable text.
Would you like to participate? Join the live streaming video sessions, comment on the manuscript draft, or contact Jeremy and Nathaniel.
Texts
Meta-documents
Project Overview
by Dr. Jeremy Tirrell, Dr. Nathaniel Rivers
Research Products
Tracing the Human in Amazon Mechanical Turk through Rhetorical Text Mining
by Dr. Jeremy Tirrell, Dr. Nathaniel RiversThis study uses text mining to examine how the language of posts on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online global crowdsource marketplace, rhetorically articulates a model of the human that emerges from concrete labor acts rather than abstract ethical capacities. The study analyzes 23,105 documents using multiple operations including weighted frequency counts, clusters and topic models, and frequency co-occurrence and n-gram maps at three grain sizes: the whole corpus; posts organized into five tiers based on compensation level; specific productive terms. Findings identify coherent human aspects that collapse distinctions between bodily and intellectual capabilities, yet the separation between humans and non-humans is indistinct, because MTurk posts repeatedly redraw such boundaries, causing characteristic traits to be variably shared.
Drafts
Resources
Resource Collections
Single Resources
Image FCM unweighted
Image Unweighted FCM diagram for "readable" and its inflections
Image Weighted FCM diagram for "opinion" and its inflections
Image FCM weighted
Video Episode 1 (3-22-19)
Image Unweighted bigram network graph for "attitude" and its inflections
Image Bigram network graph unweighted
Video Episode 3 (6-18-19)
Video Episode 2 with Dr. Jeff Rice (5-14-19)
Image Weighted bigram network graph for "feel" and its inflections