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describeMechanical Turk (Mturk) is a system that allows people to outsource work to many different people in an efficient way. For the purposes of the McNair center, we will be focused on the use of Mturk for the acquisition and cleaning of data. This is a great way to look up or clean data when you have a small number of easily understood steps that need to be repeated many times. If you data task fits this definition, then it is worth thinking about turning it into a Mturk task. In the example below, we think about how to find all the Twitter handles for a set of companies in a spreadsheet. If you were to do this by hand as an RA, you would start with the spreadsheet and go through each row searching on either google or twitter for each company. In Mturk, you would create a project. In that project, you would create a task template that would provide a set of overall instructions as well as hooks to fill in specific information about one row from your spreadsheet. When the turker receives their assignment, or HIT, they will see both the overall instructions and the specific information for that row of data in your spreadsheet. The Mturk system allows many people to work on your spreadsheet in parallel allowing the work to be completed much more quickly. If this is confusing, we will provide a concrete example below. For now, just bear in mind some essential vocabulary.
→What is Mechanical Turk
==What is Mechanical Turk==
: ''HIT:'' one task completed by a worker
: ''Project:'' a collection of HITs
: ''Turker:'' a worker on Mturk
==Accessing the Mechanical Turk Platform==
