Monday, September 7, 2009

Logic, Logistics, and Formats

The last entry discussed in brief the my attempts to develop an adequate template for crowdsourcing the manuscripts to be transcribed. Since, I have encountered a few new challenges--and occasionally "frustrations"--and learned a bit more of what is required of the "Requesters" using MTurk. The next few entries will address some of the logistics of "piloting" our concept through Mechanical Turk.



It should first be noted that, while we were originally intending to have MTurk HITs e-mail the image transcriptions to WrittenRummage@gmail.com, it has now shown itself prudent to operate primarily through MTurk. In designing a template for the general form of all transciption tasks we will be requesting, I found that MTurk supplies the requester with a variety of tools to serve whatever function might prove necessary, including multiple choice bubbles for surveys or text boxes for purposes similar to ours. Given that as a Requester we have to have one of these supplied tools in our template, it is inferred that Mechanical Turk wants most--if not all--information transfer to be done through their program. This is not entirely inconvenient or impractical; we can use the provided text box as the area in which HITs will transcribe, thus saving several delaying steps of log-ins and file formatting. I therefore changed the instructions in the template.

Images will be provided once the first MTurk request is actually made.


1 comment:

  1. How do you plan to distribute the images to the transcribers? Do you plan to require double keying, and if so, how do you plan to collate and reconcile the transcriptions? I've written my own thoughts about Mechanical Turk integration with my software, but will be fascinated to see someone actually do it.

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