Response to "Being a Turker"


The paper, "Being a Turker", is an ethnomethodological analysis of Turker Nation, which is a general forum for
Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) users. From the forum data, the paper presents new findings about Turkers. First,
Turkers treat their tasks as work where pay is the most important factor. They view AMT as a labor marketplace
where selecting a good job and having a good relationship with the requester matter. This work is important because
it provides a richer understanding of Turkers, who are real people behind the human computation process. More
work like this focusing on workers¡¯ perspective can guide designers of future crowdsourcing systems.


I learned about how the crowdsourced workers view and feel about their microtasks. Contrary to my expectation,
AMT work was treated as real job for many Turkers rather than fun activities. This meant the pay rate of tasks
significantly influences Turkers. I liked how the authors conducted extensive searches through the forum and
included interesting excerpts in the paper. As a result, the paper read like a story of real people, who had been
largely overshadowed by the grand scheme of human computation.


This paper took a qualitative approach of ethnomethodology to analyze a community of Turkers. As an
ethnomethodological analysis, the paper has a known methodological issue that the generalizability of the study may
be limited. Although the authors referenced a few other online Turker communities, their core site of data collection
remained Turker Nation. I think this paper could be improved by taking their analysis beyond Turker Nation and
providing a comparison of workers from various crowdsourcing platforms.