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Step 2Create Mechanical Turk HITs
With your topic in mind, it's time to ask people to contribute. The most efficient and economical way to do this is through Amazon Mechanical Turk. The basic idea behind Mechanical Turk is that "requesters" post different jobs that "workers" fulfill. In turn, workers get paid by requesters. A job is called a HIT, for human intelligence task.
To become a requester, you need to create and account on the Mechanical Turk Requester Site and add some money to your account ($5-$10 should be enough).
So let's create our first HIT - the MTurk interface is really geared towards people who want to take big data sets of things and match them with big groups of people. For example, when adventurer Steve Fossett went missing, friends of his uploaded thousands of satellite images (the big data set) and got a big set of workers to look at each individual image to determine if a crashed plane was visible in the image. But that kind of functionality is not really what we want: we just want to ask one simple question, but get a lot of responses. So in the Mechanical Turk requester interface, we'll skip the default options and select the "Create HITs individually" link.
In the individual HIT creation form, enter a title, description, and keyword. For example:
Title: Tell a story about your Cat
Description: What's the craziest thing your cat has ever done? Write one paragraph.
Keywords: writing, cats, pets, creativity,
1 or 2 days should be enough as an expiration date. To collect stories, choose the "plain text" answer format. Then select how many answers you'd like. 50 to 100 is a good start. The going rate is around $.05 to $.10 for a story or a picture.
Submit your task, then enter another, asking for images instead of stories. For the second task, your answer type will be "file upload" - ask workers to draw pictures on their computer (or scan them in), then send those files to you.
Then wait for the answers to trickle in.
To become a requester, you need to create and account on the Mechanical Turk Requester Site and add some money to your account ($5-$10 should be enough).
So let's create our first HIT - the MTurk interface is really geared towards people who want to take big data sets of things and match them with big groups of people. For example, when adventurer Steve Fossett went missing, friends of his uploaded thousands of satellite images (the big data set) and got a big set of workers to look at each individual image to determine if a crashed plane was visible in the image. But that kind of functionality is not really what we want: we just want to ask one simple question, but get a lot of responses. So in the Mechanical Turk requester interface, we'll skip the default options and select the "Create HITs individually" link.
In the individual HIT creation form, enter a title, description, and keyword. For example:
Title: Tell a story about your Cat
Description: What's the craziest thing your cat has ever done? Write one paragraph.
Keywords: writing, cats, pets, creativity,
1 or 2 days should be enough as an expiration date. To collect stories, choose the "plain text" answer format. Then select how many answers you'd like. 50 to 100 is a good start. The going rate is around $.05 to $.10 for a story or a picture.
Submit your task, then enter another, asking for images instead of stories. For the second task, your answer type will be "file upload" - ask workers to draw pictures on their computer (or scan them in), then send those files to you.
Then wait for the answers to trickle in.
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