Mechanical Turk (Tool)

McNair Project

Mechanical Turk (Tool)
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Description

The purpose of this page is to introduce people to the use of mechanical turk in data processing. The document is structured as follows: 1. It begins by describing the mechanical turk and the many ways in which it can be used. 2. it provides simple getting started instructions that allows a new user to access the mechanical turk system and begin a new project. 3. We give an example of a project with sample code.

What is Mechanical Turk

Mechanical Turk (Mturk) is a system that allows people to outsource work to many different people in an efficient way. For the purposes of the McNair center, we will be focused on the use of Mturk for the acquisition and cleaning of data. This is a great way to look up or clean data when you have a small number of easily understood steps that need to be repeated many times. If you data task fits this definition, then it is worth thinking about turning it into a Mturk task. In the example below, we think about how to find all the Twitter handles for a set of companies in a spreadsheet. If you were to do this by hand as an RA, you would start with the spreadsheet and go through each row searching on either google or twitter for each company. In Mturk, you would create a project. In that project, you would create a task template that would provide a set of overall instructions as well as hooks to fill in specific information about one row from your spreadsheet. When the turker receives their assignment, or HIT, they will see both the overall instructions and the specific information for that row of data in your spreadsheet. The Mturk system allows many people to work on your spreadsheet in parallel allowing the work to be completed much more quickly. If this is confusing, we will provide a concrete example below. For now, just bear in mind some essential vocabulary.

Mechanical Turk Vocabulary

Requester: the people posting work on the system

HIT: one task completed by a worker

Project: a collection of HITs

Turker: a worker on Mturk

Accessing the Mechanical Turk Platform

• go to The Mechanical Turk Requester page
• Log into the system using the following

email: esi@rice.edu

pass: 9Million!

• To create a new project, click on the Create link and follow the directions in the Create Project Example section below
• To modify an existing project, follow the directions in the Modify an Existing Project section below

Creating a New Project Example

In the steps below, we describe the creation of a Turk project that asks Turk workers to find the twitter handles of companies. It will take as input a series of google search queries in csv form and the workers to enter the search strings into google and look to see if there are google handles that are returned on the first page of the search results.

Step 1, Project Info: Once you click on the create link, you will be brought to an interface with a number of text entry boxes. You want to summarize your project in ways that will be informative for the team as well as potential Turk workers choosing between projects. In the figure below, we describe a HIT Project FINISH.

Figure 1: Twitter Project Info

How to choose your data

Step 2

Existing HIT Library

create a list of existing hits and what they do

TDL with HITS

• Data validation using javascript

Hash

import requests
response = requests.get(
    "https://www.eventbriteapi.com/v3/organizers/2300226659/events/",
    headers = {
        "Authorization": "Bearer CRAQ5MAXEGHKEXSUSWXN",
    },
    verify = True,
)