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Following Mechanical Turks

Articulating the Human in "Human Intelligence Tasks"

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Dr. Jeremy Tirrell
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Dr. Nathaniel Rivers

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Regular video discussions every other Friday at 9:00 a.m. Eastern. Next video discussion Apr. 23.

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.

Recent Activity

See all Activity
  • Resource Added

    Episode 45 (4-9-21)

    April 09, 2021
  • Resource Added

    Episode 44 (3-26-21)

    March 26, 2021
  • Resource Added

    Episode 43 (3-12-21)

    March 12, 2021
  • Resource Added

    Episode 42 (2-26-21)

    February 26, 2021
  • Resource Added

    Episode 41 (2-12-21)

    February 12, 2021
  • Resource Added

    Episode 40 (1-29-21)

    February 12, 2021

Texts

Meta-documents

  • Project Overview

    by Dr. Jeremy Tirrell, Dr. Nathaniel Rivers
    Updated May 2019
    • 4This text has 4 annotations
    • 0This text has 0 highlights
  • Project Credits

    Updated July 2019
    • 0This text has 0 annotations
    • 0This text has 0 highlights

Research Products

  • Tracing the Human in Amazon Mechanical Turk through Rhetorical Text Mining

    by Dr. Jeremy Tirrell, Dr. Nathaniel Rivers

    This 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.

    Updated October 2020
    • 42This text has 42 annotations
    • 0This text has 0 highlights

Drafts

  • Articulation of Theory

    by Dr. Nathaniel Rivers

    Here we consider our theoretical approach(es) to MTurk

    Updated May 2019
    • 8This text has 8 annotations
    • 0This text has 0 highlights

Resources

Resource Collections

  • Data and Supporting Resources

    Resource Collection
  • Video Discussion Episodes

    Resource Collection
2 Total 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

86 Total Resources

Metadata

  • publisher
    Enculturation: Intermezzo
  • rights
    This text is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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