Readings
This page aims to link to a broad range of discussions of crowd work that can inform design, institution-building, advocacy, and policy efforts to understand and address ethical issues. In my view this includes both readings that address ethical issues explicitly as well as those that offer insight into workers’ work processes, motivations, work experiences, opinions, and general perspectives; and explore different kinds of arrangements and relationships between workers and employers. As researchers, it is easy for us to fall unquestioningly into the worldviews offered to us by our fields — whether that’s computing, sociology, law, or the humanities. This page aims to support efforts to resist that easy temptation.
This page was last updated 25 Dec 2013.
Informal
Worker discussions
- mTurk & Amazon in the media subforum, Turker Nation
- Responses to the 2013 Turker Bill of Rights survey (solicited and organized by Lilly Irani)
Employer and researcher discussions
- Panos Ipeirotis, reponse to the question “How many active workers are there on Mechanical Turk?” (Quora)
- Panos Ipeirotis and Isaac Nichols (former technical project manager of Mechanical Turk), responses to the question “Is Mechanical Turk really broken? (Quora)
Journalism
- Ellen Cushing, Dawn of the digital sweatshop, East Bay Express, 1 Aug 2012
- Andrew Leonard, The internet's destroying work — and turning the old middle class into the new proletariat, Salon.com, 12 Jul 2013
Legal
Otey v. CrowdFlower
- 2013 complaint text, Christopher Otey, on behalf of himself and others similarly situated, Plaintiff, v. CrowdFlower, Inc., Lukas Biewald, and Chris van Pelt, Defendants. Case No. 3:12-CV-05524-JST. US District Court, N.D. California, San Francisco Division, 17 Jun 2013.
- Statements from law firms
- Journalistic coverage
- Erik Neumann, Tech company CrowdFlower denies labor violation, MissionLocal, 4 Dec 2012.
- Eric Mack, The lawsuit that could help undo (or cement) crowdsourcing in the United States, crowdsourcing.org (self-proclaimed “crowdsourcing industry website”), 7 Jan 2013.
Research
Law
- Miriam A. Cherry, 2013, Cyber commodification. Maryland Law Review 72(2): 381.
- Alek Felstiner, 2011, Working the crowd: employment and labor law in the crowdsourcing industry. Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 32(1).
- Miriam A. Cherry, 2010, A taxonomy of virtual work. Georgia Law Review 45: 951.
- Miriam A. Cherry, 2009, Working for (virtually) minimum wage: applying the Fair Labor Standards Act in cyberspace. Alabama Law Review 60(5): 1077-1110.
Media studies
- Lilly Irani, The cultural work of microwork. New Media and Society, 21 Nov 2013.
- Florian Schmidt, 2013, For a few dollars more: class action against crowdsourcing. APRJA 2(1).
- Lilly Irani, Microworking the crowd. Limn No. 2, 2012.
- Alek Felstiner, The weakness of crowds. Limn No. 2, 2012.
- Adam Fish, Ramesh Srinivasan, Digital labor is the new killer app, New Media and Society, 18 Oct 2011.
Computing
Computational linguistics
- K. Fort, G. Adda, K. B. Cohen, 2011. Amazon Mechanical Turk: gold mine or coal mine? Computational Linguistics 37(2): 413-420.
Human-centered computing (i.e., human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, ICT4D)
- D. Martin, B. V. Hanrahan, J. O’Neill, N. Gupta. Being a Turker. CSCW ’14, to appear.
- D. Vakharia, M. Lease. Beyond AMT: an analysis of crowd work platforms. Working paper, 7 Oct 2013, arXiv:1310.1672v1 [cs.CY].
- M. Lease, J. Hullman, J. P. Bigham, M. S. Bernstein, J. Kim, W. Lasecki, S. Bakhshi, T. Mitra, R. C. Miller. Mechanical Turk is not anonymous. Working paper, 6 Mar 2013.
- L. Irani, M. S. Silberman. Turkopticon: interrupting worker invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk. CHI ’13: 611-620.
- A. Kittur, J. V. Nickerson, M. S. Bernstein, E. M. Gerber, A. Shaw, J. Zimmerman, M. Lease, J. J. Horton. The future of crowd work. CSCW ’13: 1301-1317.
- J. O’Neill, D. Martin. Relationship-based business process crowdsourcing? INTERACT ’13: 429-446.
- S. Khanna, A. Ratan, J. Davis, W. Thies. Evaluating and improving the usability of Mechanical Turk for low-income workers in India. DEV ’10: 12.
- Gawade, M., R. Vaish, M. Nduta, J. Davis. Exploring microwork opportunities through cybercafés. DEV ’12: 21.
- Gupta, A., W. Thies, E. Cutrell, R. Balakrishnan. mClerk: enabling mobile crowdsourcing in developing regions. CHI ’12: 1843.
- Samdaria, N., A. Mathur, R. Balakrishnan. Paying in kind for crowdsourced work in developing regions. Pervasive ’12: 343.
- Kulkarni, A., P. Gutheim, P. Narula, D. Rolnitzky, T. Parikh, B. Hartmann. MobileWorks: designing for quality in a managed crowdsourcing architecture. IEEE Internet Computing 16(5): 28, 2012.
- S. P. Dow, A. Kulkarni, S. R. Klemmer, B. Hartmann. Shepherding the crowd yields better work. CSCW ’12: 1013-1022.
- E. Adar. Why I hate Mechanical Turk research (and workshops). CHI ’11 workshop on crowdsourcing and human computation.
- B. B. Bederson, A. Quinn. Participation in human computation. CHI ’11 workshop on crowdsourcing and human computation.
- D. A. Grier. Foundational issues in human computing and crowdsourcing. CHI ’11 workshop on crowdsourcing and human computation.
- B. B. Bederson, A. J. Quinn. Web workers unite! Addressing challenges of online laborers. CHI ’11 EA: 97-105 (alt.chi).
- A. J. Quinn, B. B. Bederson. Human computation: a survey and taxonomy of a growing field. CHI ’11: 1403-1412.
- P. G. Ipeirotis, 2010. Analyzing the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace. XRDS 17(2): 16-21.
- M. S. Silberman, L. Irani, J. Ross, 2010. Ethics and tactics of professional crowdwork. XRDS 17(2): 39-43.
Human computation
- P. Narula, P. Gutheim, D. Rolnitzky, A. Kulkarni, B. Hartmann. MobileWorks: a mobile crowdsourcing platform for workers at the bottom of the pyramid. HCOMP ’11.
- L. B. Chilton, R. C. Miller, J. J. Horton, S. Azenkot. Task search in a human computation market. HCOMP ’10: 1-9.
- S. Kochhar, S. Mazzocchi, P. Paritosh. The anatomy of a large-scale human computation engine. HCOMP ’10: 10-17.
- M. S. Silberman, L. Irani, J. Ross, B. Tomlinson. Sellers’ problems in human computation markets. HCOMP ’10: 18-21.