Tag Archives: digital labor
Some work is born digital: from gold farmers to game masters
June 1, 2010… or digitizing existing tasks such as design and development, and distributing them to a global labor pool via the Internet.
One aspect of the digitization of work has received less attention than it perhaps deserves. This aspect is the emergence of work that is “born digital”. “Born digital” is a term originally used to denote products such as books and music that are created directly in digital form, as opposed to being digitized versions of analogue materials. It has also been …
Tags: captcha crowdsourcing digital labor human computation Mechanical Turk richard heeks world of warcraft
captcha, crowdsourcing, digital labor, human computation, Mechanical Turk, richard heeks, world of warcraft | 3 CommentsFrom millions of tasks to thousands of jobs: Bringing digital work to the developing world
February 1, 2012… benefited in some way from the unprecedented access to knowledge and services brought about by the digital revolution. But producing the knowledge banks and services has so far been a predominately rich-country business. The world’s poorest countries have generally not been able to participate in the production side of the digital economy and share in its rewards. This is changing, however, and an initiative lead by the World Bank’s info Dev program is helping to shape the change.
As …
Crowds against the Machine: will digital workers soon be digitized?
November 18, 2010… images be exactly the kind of microtask you’d expect outfits like ours to distribute to digital workers? If a bunch of robots will soon be able to complete such tasks faster and cheaper, will microtasks become just a footnote in the history of A.I.?
Before we all pack up and donate our office space to cybernetics, it’s worth considering the fundamental premise of distributed microtasks. As most people who read this blog know, microtasks generally fit into a category known as …
Michael S Hart: a man of many words
October 18, 2011… only was Project Gutenberg the first large-scale project to digitize books, it used distributed labor to do it.
Since 1981 Project Gutenberg has been run entirely by online volunteers (for the first 10 years, Hart apparently typed in every single book himself). Unlike Steve “control freak” Jobs, Michael Hart described himself as “not a very bossy boss”. To this day, the crowd (all 20,000 of them) is in control of pretty much everything at Gutenberg.org, from selecting and …
E-petitions: a vote for the future?
January 27, 2011… credit for trying, but why call on the crowd at all if you don’t listen when they answer?
Digital Debates
Given their track record, I couldn’t help feeling a little skeptical when I read the latest pledge by the same Conservative party: any e-petition with over 100,000 votes on the UK government website will be guaranteed a debate in Parliament. But since it’s a new year, I’m prepared to give the guys in suits another chance and take the idea seriously. It’s actually a …
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