Platform Cooperativism Resource Library

Being a Turker

By David Martin, Benjamin V. Hanrahan, Jacki O'Neill, and Neha Gupta
resource format: Academic Paper. Published by CSCW 2014 • Performing Crowd Work
date published: February 2014

Summary

Crowdsourcing is a key current topic in CSCW. We build upon findings of a few qualitative studies of crowdworkers. We conducted an ethnomethodological analysis of publicly available content on Turker Nation, a general forum for Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) users. Using forum data we provide novel depth and detail on how the Turker Nation members operate as economic actors, working out which Requesters and jobs are worthwhile to them. We show some of the key ways Turker Nation functions as a community and also look further into Turker-Requester relationships from the Turker perspective — considering practical, emotional and moral aspects. Finally, following Star and Strauss [25] we analyse Turking as a form of invisible work. We do this to illustrate practical and ethical issues relating to working with Turkers and AMT, and to promote design directions to support Turkers and their relationships with Requesters.

Author Keywords: Ethnomethodology; content analysis; crowdsourcing; microtasking; Amazon Mechanical Turk; Turker Nation.

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Added May 7, 2020