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I am not sure if you are using the term "Mechanical Turk" correctly. Would you mind clarifying?
by elvinyung 8y ago
I am not sure if you are using the term "Mechanical Turk" correctly. Would you mind clarifying?
- grzm 8y agoThey're likely referring to Amazon Mechanical Turk: https://www.mturk.com https://www.mturk.com as opposed to the chess-playing variety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
- qbaqbaqba 8y agoBecoming 'a worker' is very eye opening experience.
- elvinyung 8y agoGot it, MTurk defintely makes more sense than the Turk :) Which actually raises an interesting point. The word data comes from Latin dare for "to give". So, as Rob Kitchin observes, while something like MTurk can be properly described as collecting "data", Google and the vast majority of networked platforms should really be more properly described as collecting "capta", from Latin capere, or "to take".
- sdrothrock 8y agoYou are absolutely correct and I completely agree; this is part of what I wanted to get at. Google also uses this two-fold "data-gathering disguised as a service" methodology in its captchas -- as your reference to "capare" reminded me. :)
- elvinyung 8y agoIt's actually interesting because Rob Kitchin has started almost exclusively using the word "capta" in his later works. I'm tempted to follow him in doing that in my personal writings. (Captcha and other forms of "data labor" [1] or even "data slavery" is also something that I've started exploring.) [1] https://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_facpub/11/ https://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_facpub/11/
- sdrothrock 8y agoI had no idea anyone was doing in-depth research into this kind of -- as he aptly calls it -- data labor. This would really merit its own HN submission. Thank you for showing me!
- coldtea 8y agoPoint being we, the users, are the mechanical turks, carrying out Google's experiments.