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Regular video discussions every other Friday. Next video discussion on March 22 at 2:30 p.m. Eastern.

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 and nonhuman 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 principal investigators Jeremy Tirrell and Nathaniel Rivers move from initial concepts to completed texts. 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. Manuscript drafts are available online during development and are open to in-progress annotations, with the hope that they will formatively shape a paper's 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.

A 1980s reconstruction of the original Mechanical Turk

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