A few weeks ago the Amazon Mechanical Turk team introduced a new interface to simplify the process of creating HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks). I promised them that I would blog about it, and it has been near the top of my todo list until now. I'm holed up in a hotel near London Heathrow airport, and I'm going to spend the morning catching up on some blogging.
Introduction
The new Amazon Mechanical Turk Requester Site is accessible through this button:
The button leads directly to the requester site, which looks like this:
Before you can start creating your HITs, you need to create a Requester account and you need to put some money in it (so that you can pay your Workers). Once you have done this, you can create your HITs using one of two HIT wizards: basic or advanced.
The Basic Wizard
The basic wizard lets your create an entire HIT using one fairly simple page. You simply fill in the fields, confirm the cost (conveniently calculated and displayed in a little box in the corner), and you are ready to go. I created a simple "Worker Demographics" HIT. The HIT simply asked the worker to reply with the full name of the country where they live. Here's what it looks like:
Once the HIT is ready to go, you can preview it and then (when you are happy with how it appears) you go ahead and create it. It is posted to the Mechanical Turk site, and is immediately available to Workers all over the world. You'll get a confirmation box with all of the salient information:
The Advanced Wizard
The advanced wizard (totally unrelated to anything that you would find in a Harry Potter book), gives you a bit more control over the content and appearance of the HIT. Your HIT can have a free text answer or a list of options that the Worker can choose between. As my plane was landing at London Heathrow last night I saw an unusual sight and quickly snapped a picture. So I thought it would be fun to see if people were able to identify what I saw. Here's the HIT:
Here's the actual HIT in action, as a Worker would see it:
That was, by the way, one of those million-in-one shots. I have started to keep my camera primed and ready so that I am fully prepared to capture interesting stuff like this rather than regretting it forever.
Managing HIT Results
The Requester site also lets you manage the HIT results as submitted by the Workers. My demographic survey has been running for a few minutes; here are the answers that I have received so far:
From here I can approve or reject all or some of the results. I can also view the completed results. I will post the (unscientifically collected) worker demographic data as soon as I have it.
-- Jeff;
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