{"id":270,"date":"2011-06-10T14:39:03","date_gmt":"2011-06-10T21:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tabithahart.net\/?p=270"},"modified":"2011-06-10T14:40:07","modified_gmt":"2011-06-10T21:40:07","slug":"crowdsourcing-data-analysis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/?p=270","title":{"rendered":"Crowdsourcing data analysis"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the recent ICA<\/a> conference in Boston I attended a very interesting talk about crowdsourcing.<\/p>\n

For those of you new to this term, crowdsourcing is a portmanteau combining \u201ccrowd\u201d and \u201coutsourcing.\u201d\u00a0 It is the process of outsourcing small, repetitive tasks to a large group of workers.\u00a0 According to Wikipedia<\/a> it was first coined by Jeff Howe of Wired magazine in his article, \u201cThe rise of crowdsourcing\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The talk I attended was called \u201cCrowdsourced Content Analysis\u201d and was given by Aaron Shaw of UC Berkeley<\/a>.\u00a0 At the micro level, Aaron\u2019s talk was about the pros and cons of using crowdsourced labor to do data analysis. Aaron described how he had used Amazon\u2019s Mechanical Turk<\/a>, one of the earliest and best-known crowdsourcing sites, to outsource the content analytic data analysis for one of his research projects.\u00a0 He touched upon some of the logistical and tactical issues involved in taking this approach.\u00a0 At a macro level, Aaron asked larger questions such as:\u00a0 How do we ensure and measure the digital literacy skills of a crowdsourced labor force?\u00a0 How do we test for and ensure reliability and accuracy?\u00a0 What are the ethics of crowdsourcing?<\/p>\n

While online crowdsourcing of data analysis (content analysis or otherwise) doesn\u2019t seem to have quite caught on yet amongst academics, it may well become the go-to tool in the near future.\u00a0 Aaron\u2019s talk highlighted its attractive features \u2013 low cost, online distribution of information, easy handling of large data sets, inexpensive labor \u2013 and left us with many interesting and important questions to reflect on.<\/p>\n

Do you have any experience crowdsourcing your data analysis?\u00a0 What tools have you used?\u00a0 What was your experience like?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the recent ICA conference in Boston I attended a very interesting talk about crowdsourcing. For those of you new to this term, crowdsourcing is a portmanteau combining \u201ccrowd\u201d and \u201coutsourcing.\u201d\u00a0 It is the process of outsourcing small, repetitive tasks to a large group of workers.\u00a0 According to Wikipedia it was first coined by Jeff […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=270"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":274,"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions\/274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}