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Exploring Trade-Offs Between Learning and Productivity in Crowdsourced History

Published: 01 November 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Crowdsourcing more complex and creative tasks is seen as a desirable goal for both employers and workers, but these tasks traditionally require domain expertise. Employers can recruit only expert workers, but this approach does not scale well. Alternatively, employers can decompose complex tasks into simpler micro-tasks, but some domains, such as historical analysis, cannot be easily modularized in this way. A third approach is to train workers to learn the domain expertise. This approach offers clear benefits to workers, but is perceived as costly or infeasible for employers. In this paper, we explore the trade-offs between learning and productivity in training crowd workers to analyze historical documents. We compare CrowdSCIM, a novel approach that teaches historical thinking skills to crowd workers, with two crowd learning techniques from prior work and a baseline. Our evaluation (n=360) shows that CrowdSCIM allows workers to learn domain expertise while producing work of equal or higher quality versus other conditions, but efficiency is slightly lower.

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 2, Issue CSCW
November 2018
4104 pages
EISSN:2573-0142
DOI:10.1145/3290265
Issue’s Table of Contents
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Publication History

Published: 01 November 2018
Published in PACMHCI Volume 2, Issue CSCW

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Author Tags

  1. analytical thinking
  2. crowdsourcing
  3. domain expertise
  4. historical thinking
  5. history
  6. learning
  7. productivity
  8. scim-c

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  • US National Historical Publications and Records Commission

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