12 research outputs found
Crowdsourcing and Scholarly Culture: Understanding Expertise in an Age of Popularism
The increasing volume of digital material available to the humanities creates clear potential for crowdsourcing. However, tasks in the digital humanities typically do not satisfy the standard requirement for decomposition into microtasks each of which must require little expertise on behalf of the worker and little context of the broader task. Instead, humanities tasks require scholarly knowledge to perform and even where sub-tasks can be extracted, these often involve broader context of the document or corpus from which they are extracted. That is the tasks are macrotasks, resisting simple decomposition. Building on a case study from musicology, the In Concert project, we will explore both the barriers to crowdsourcing in the creation of digital corpora and also examples where elements of automatic processing or less-expert work are possible in a broader matrix that also includes expert microtasks and macrotasks. Crucially we will see that the macrotask–microtask distinction is nuanced: it is often possible to create a partial decomposition into less-expert microtasks with residual expert macrotasks, and crucially do this in ways that preserve scholarly values
Crowdsourcing and Scholarly Culture: Understanding Expertise in an Age of Popularism
The increasing volume of digital material available to the humanities creates clear potential for crowdsourcing. However, tasks in the digital humanities typically do not satisfy the standard requirement for decomposition into microtasks each of which must require little expertise on behalf of the worker and little context of the broader task. Instead, humanities tasks require scholarly knowledge to perform and even where sub-tasks can be extracted, these often involve broader context of the document or corpus from which they are extracted. That is the tasks are macrotasks, resisting simple decomposition. Building on a case study from musicology, the In Concert project, we will explore both the barriers to crowdsourcing in the creation of digital corpora and also examples where elements of automatic processing or less-expert work are possible in a broader matrix that also includes expert microtasks and macrotasks. Crucially we will see that the macrotask–microtask distinction is nuanced: it is often possible to create a partial decomposition into less-expert microtasks with residual expert macrotasks, and crucially do this in ways that preserve scholarly values
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An Examination of the Work Practices of Crowdfarms
Crowdsourcing is a new value creation business model. Annual revenue of the Chinese market alone is hundreds of millions of dollars, yet few studies have focused on the practices of the Chinese crowdsourcing workforce, and those that do mainly focus on solo crowdworkers. We have extended our study of solo crowdworker practices to include crowdfarms, a relatively new entry to the gig economy: small companies that carry out crowdwork as a key part of their business. We report here on interviews of people who work in 53 crowdfarms. We describe how crowdfarms procure jobs, carry out macrotasks and microtasks, manage their reputation, and employ different management practices to motivate crowdworkers and customers
Who wants to cooperate-and why? Attitude and perception of crowd workers in online labor markets
Existing literature and studies predominantly focus on how crowdsource
workers individually complete tasks and projects. Our study examines
crowdsource workers' willingness to work collaboratively. We report results
from a survey of 122 workers on a leading online labor platform (Upwork) to
examine crowd workers' behavioral preferences for collaboration and explore
several antecedents of cooperative behaviors. We then test if actual
cooperative behavior matches with workers' behavioral preferences through an
incentivized social dilemma experiment. We find that respondents cooperate at a
higher rate (85%) than reported in previous comparable studies (between
50-75%). This high rate of cooperation is likely explained by an ingroup bias.
Using a sequential mediation model we demonstrate the importance of a sense of
shared expectations and accountability for cooperation. We contribute to a
better understanding of the potential for collaborative work in crowdsourcing
by accessing if and what social factors and collective culture exist among
crowd workers. We discuss the implications of our results for platform
designers by highlighting the importance of platform features that promote
shared expectations and improve accountability. Overall, contrary to existing
literature and predictions, our results suggest that crowd workers display
traits that are more consistent with belonging to a coherent group with a
shared collective culture, rather than being anonymous actors in a
transaction-based market
Crowdsourcing Coordination: A Review and Research Agenda for Crowdsourcing Coordination Used for Macro-tasks
Crowdsourcing has become a widely accepted approach to leveraging the skills and expertise of others to accomplish work. Despite the potential of crowdsourcing to tackle complex problems, it has often been used to address simple micro-tasks. To tackle more complex macro-tasks, more attention is needed to better comprehend crowd coordination. Crowd coordination is defined as the synchronization of crowd workers in an attempt to direct and align their efforts in pursuit of a shared goal. The goal of this chapter is to advance our understanding of crowd coordination to tackle complex macro-tasks. To accomplish this, we have three objectives. First, we review popular theories of coordination. Second, we examine the current approaches to crowd coordination in the HCI and CSCW literature. Finally, the chapter identifies shortcomings in the literature and proposes a research agenda directed at advancing our understanding of crowd coordination needed to address complex macro-tasks.National Science Foundation grant CHS-1617820Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/150620/1/Kim and Robert 2019 Preprint Chapter 2.pdfDescription of Kim and Robert 2019 Preprint Chapter 2.pdf : Preprint Versio
Self-Organizing Teams in Online Work Settings
As the volume and complexity of distributed online work increases, the
collaboration among people who have never worked together in the past is
becoming increasingly necessary. Recent research has proposed algorithms to
maximize the performance of such teams by grouping workers according to a set
of predefined decision criteria. This approach micro-manages workers, who have
no say in the team formation process. Depriving users of control over who they
will work with stifles creativity, causes psychological discomfort and results
in less-than-optimal collaboration results. In this work, we propose an
alternative model, called Self-Organizing Teams (SOTs), which relies on the
crowd of online workers itself to organize into effective teams. Supported but
not guided by an algorithm, SOTs are a new human-centered computational
structure, which enables participants to control, correct and guide the output
of their collaboration as a collective. Experimental results, comparing SOTs to
two benchmarks that do not offer user agency over the collaboration, reveal
that participants in the SOTs condition produce results of higher quality and
report higher teamwork satisfaction. We also find that, similarly to machine
learning-based self-organization, human SOTs exhibit emergent collective
properties, including the presence of an objective function and the tendency to
form more distinct clusters of compatible teammates
A Task-Interdependency Model of Complex Collaboration Towards Human-Centered Crowd Work
Models of crowdsourcing and human computation often assume that individuals
independently carry out small, modular tasks. However, while these models have
successfully shown how crowds can accomplish significant objectives, they can
inadvertently advance a less than human view of crowd workers and fail to
capture the unique human capacity for complex collaborative work. We present a
model centered on interdependencies -- a phenomenon well understood to be at
the core of collaboration -- that allows one to formally reason about diverse
challenges to complex collaboration. Our model represents tasks as an
interdependent collection of subtasks, formalized as a task graph. We use it to
explain challenges to scaling complex collaborative work, underscore the
importance of expert workers, reveal critical factors for learning on the job,
and explore the relationship between coordination intensity and occupational
wages. Using data from O*NET and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we introduce
an index of occupational coordination intensity to validate our theoretical
predictions. We present preliminary evidence that occupations with greater
coordination intensity are less exposed to displacement by AI, and discuss
opportunities for models that emphasize the collaborative capacities of human
workers, bridge models of crowd work and traditional work, and promote AI in
roles augmenting human collaboration