Digital labour

Published 31/1/2021

I’ve always had an interest in labour relations and since 2017 I’ve been collaborating with Information School colleague Alessandro Checco on research in the field of crowdwork.

I began by contributing a social science lens to a computational paper on Gold Question detection being developed by Alessandro and another colleague Gianluca Demartini. The idea behind the paper was to build a technical tool that would alert crowdworkers to the presence of quality control checks in a work task, and I developed a theoretical lense drawing in part of Galloway and Thacker’s concept of the ‘exploit’. This was submitted to HCOMP 2018 where it was awarded Best Paper Award.

  • Checco A, Bates J & Demartini G (2018) All That Glitters Is Gold – An Attack Scheme on Gold Questions in Crowdsourcing. HCOMP (pp 2-11) View this article in WRRO

This work was also further developed in the following papers:

Soon after the HCOMP paper was published, we started working with researcher Elli Gerakopoulou to add a qualitative element to our work in this area, working with crowdworkers to explore their perceptions of the gold question detector as well as other ideas for addressing some of the issues they experience. This line of work builds on work of researchers such as Lily Irani who developed the Turkopticon plugin.

From this qualitative research came the idea of a crowdworker co-operative which we presented an initial prototype design for in book chapter to be published in 2021.

  • Bates J, Checco A, Gerakopoulou E (forthcoming) Worker perspectives on designs for a crowdwork co-operative. Hepp, A., Jarke, J., & Kramp, L. (Eds.) (forthcoming 2021). Data Power: New Perspectives in Critical Data Studies. Palgrave.

We are continuing to write up our research in this area although have been a little slowed down by the pandemic. We hope to published further papers in 2021.