Digital Sweatshops as Research Infrastructure? Critical and Practical Perspectives to Crowdsourcing in Academic Research (CROWDINFRA)

Background

This project examines the role of microtask crowdsourcing as a part of the academic infrastructure. Microtask crowdsourcing involves distributing small tasks that require human intelligence to masses of non-expert workers available on online platforms, who are paid for their work. Natural language processing, computer vision and other data-driven fields are already dependent on microtask crowdsourcing for creating data for training and evaluating algorithms, but the use of crowdsourcing is now expanding to social sciences and the humanities as well.

Previous research has identified a wide range of ethical issues associated with microtask crowdsourcing, which range from sweatshop wages to various forms of invisible labour, such as unpaid work needed for qualifications on the platform. However, much of the discussion about ethics has revolved around those who post work on the platforms and those who perform the work. We seek to focus on the role of crowdsourcing platforms, which are often presented as neutral enables of crowdsourced work.

To do so, we draw on sociological perspectives on technology and platforms, in combination with approaches from the digital humanities and human computing, which we use to critically examine the role of platforms in microtask crowdsourcing, especially in academic contexts.