Let’s Mechanical Turk
Update 3:20 PM U.S. Eastern Time: All the HITs have been uploaded and claimed, so none remain. Thanks to the 78 of you who participated. We’ll let you know how it works out.
We want to pay you two cents (US$0.02) to help us improve the ESV text database. You don’t need any special biblical knowledge.
What to Do
- Go to the Mechanical Turk website.
- Search for HITs containing “quotation.”
- Find our HITs, titled “Identify the speaker of a quotation” from Good News Publishers. If you can’t find any HITs, there may not be any available at the moment. We’ll upload HITs throughout the day, so you may want to try again later.
- Click “View a HIT in this group.”
- Read the instructions.
- Click “Accept HIT” if you want to work on this question. (You may have to sign in.)
- Answer the question, and you’re done (or ready to work on another HIT).
- We’ll review your answer and approve the transfer of two cents into your Amazon account.
Background
We’re always looking to improve the completeness of our database containing the ESV text. We thought we’d try out Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which pays people a small amount to perform tasks that computers have trouble with.
In this instance, we’re looking to identify the speaker (when named) of the 5,500 direct quotations in the Bible.
We’ll let you know how this experiment in database normalization turns out.
January 18th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
I talk an awful lot about sharing on this blog. I have a really good non-photographic example of what I am talking about, because I know sharing really scares certain photographers: The English Standard Version of the Bible.
January 18th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
“We’re always looking to improve the quality of the ESV text database, especially as we prepare an OSIS version. (OSIS is an XML format for the Bible.) OSIS allows us to indicate who speaks each direct quotation in the Bible.”
January 18th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Great advice from Fred Wilson on bringing someone in from the outside to run your startup. Interesting concept video showing off the ability of an animation company. Thanks Andy. The rm *nix command. Overheard on the phone.
January 18th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
When I first looked in on the Mechanical Turk it had about 500 hits available (all Amazon sponsored. I spent some time looking over it, but I couldn’t see anything worth bothering with even as it grew.
January 18th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Bible quote database built with Amazon Mechanical Turk for $75 2 cents a quote, with a 98.3% success rate [via]. read more at Waxy.org Links. rss2lj.
January 18th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
The Standard Bible Society used the “crowdsourcing” of Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk to produce an English Standard version of the bible at $.02 a verse and 98.3% accuracy. I had forgotten all about the mechanical turk until I read this
January 18th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
There are some things that computers are good at and people aren’t. There are other things that people are good at and computers aren’t. Then there are the things that are trivially simple for people to do, but computers literally fail
January 18th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Bible quote database built with Amazon Mechanical Turk for $75. Okay the sheep were cute, but this is interesting.
January 18th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
I’m still working away (far too slowly for my impatient tastes) on the first complete first of New Testament Names, a semantic knowledgebase of named things in the New Testament and their relationships: you can get a sense of it from
January 18th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Esv_blog There are some fascinating posts over at the ESV blog. ESV refers to the English Standard Version of the Bible. In order to increase the accuracy of their database of Biblical quotations, they used the Amazon Mechanical Turk.
January 18th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
From the blogroll… New Fink release. CameraHobby - Learning Modules and e-Books. Mechanical Turk Recap.
January 18th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Our experiment with Mechanical Turk went better than we expected. We were able to approve 85% of submissions automatically, and we ultimately approved 98.3% of submissions. These figures came in higher than we planned: we thought we
February 1st, 2007 at 7:34 am
Another cool use of the Mechanical Turk. This has to be the most innovative thing I’ve seen in that it is an api for manual labour.
February 1st, 2007 at 7:34 am
Producers of the English Standard Version Bible wanted an electronic database that would identify all 5500 direct quotes in the Bible by speaker. So they uploaded all of the quotes to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk…
February 1st, 2007 at 7:34 am
Bible annotation using Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” HIT service; a success. However they did invite their blog readers to participate, which would have skewed results by providing willing participants…
February 1st, 2007 at 7:35 am
Sounds like spam, but it’s not. Earn $0.02ca time to help the ESV people identify the speaker of a quotation.
February 1st, 2007 at 10:38 am
The ESV Bible team crowdsourced their interlinked search database to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk…
February 1st, 2007 at 10:38 am
In addition to being a great translation, the ESV guys are very high-tech…my favorite combination Christians and geeks…