Richard K Miller

This morning I listened to a fascinating podcast by Jon Udell in which he interviewed representatives from CastingWords and Mycroft, two companies that build on Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 vision “harnessing collective intelligence”.

CastingWords is a podcast transcription service built on Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk platform. CastingWords charges between $0.42 and $0.75 per minute to transcribe your audio. They in turn outsource the actual transcription labor to workers on the Mechanical Turk. The Mechanical Turk is interesting because it brings together “workers” and “employers” for microtasks. Nathan McFarland said that many of their “workers” do transcription while on the clock at other jobs, jobs that simply require a physical presence. Doing transcription work for CastingWords could provide a second income for stay-at-home moms, night security guards, or college students. This is particularly interesting for people that can speak a second language and could do translation. (For more on the Mechanical Turk, see my post on Empowering the disabled, poor, and distant.)

Mycroft is a Berkeley project that is producing puzzles and questions in the form of banner ads. The idea is that instead of simply displaying an advertisement, these banner ads allow user interaction. A user might be prompted to transcribe a line of text or describe a photo in their own words. While thesy may appear to be puzzles or games, the user is actually doing useful work, which “employers” will pay for. Benjamin Hill explains that there isn’t an easy way for blog readers to leave (monetary) “tips” for blogs they like, but they could contribute to a blog by completing a few tasks in a banner. (Click on the Mycroft link for an example.) It’s like washing the dishes at a restaurant when you can’t pay.

Both projects made me think of the Mormon church’s genealogy efforts. Rumor has it that they intend to digitize and make searchable ALL of their genealogy archives and that a former Symantec executive has volunteered to help make it happen. That would, of course, requires massive amounts of data entry and double checking. I think the Mechanical Turk or Mycroft could be great platforms for making this happen.

In a Mormon ward a couple of years ago, I was assigned to be an “extraction worker”, meaning I had to transcribe genealogical records. I might be given, for example, death records from Alabama in the 1950’s and I had to type them into the program. But the software had to be installed on my machine and it was only available for Windows. My moving all of this labor to the Web, using a platform like the MTurk, people could do extraction work from any computer at any location, and it wouldn’t require you to go through the hassle of installing anything, which presumably means that any Church member could contribute a few minutes each Sunday instead of only the assigned extraction workers. This would also make the work available to members of other faiths who might have an equal interest in digitizing genealogy records.

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