AIEM crowdcoding workshop at #ICA2018

BU AIEM will host a pre-conference on crowdcoding at the 2018 annual conference of International Communication Association at Prague, the Czech republic.

ICA Preconference: Crowdsourcing as a Content Analysis Tool

May 24, 13:00 – 17:00

(Location: The Hilton Prague – Istanbul)

Crowdsourcing is a popular method in computer science for categorizing and classifying text and objects. This preconference introduces crowdsourcing for communication researchers as an emerging content analysis method. Rather than rely on a few human coders to carry out a content analysis, the crowdsourcing approach outsources coding tasks to numerous people online (e.g., multiple people code the same item), and applies an aggregation policy to make a decision on a given item.

Through a hands-on workshop and research presentations, this preconference explores:

1) Different crowdsourcing platforms to carry out a project. A demonstration will be given to show how to use two different crowdsourcing platforms: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a well-established service, and Figure Eight (previously Crowdflower), an emerging service. In the hands-on workshop, attendees will set up their own project on Figure Eight, and be guided in the steps, from set-up to extracting and analyzing the crowdworkers’ results.

2) Crowdsourcing as a method that is both cheaper and more efficient than manual content analysis. Can it also be as valid and reliable? Research presentations on both “crowdcoding” and traditional manual coding will be given, as well as a discussion about cost structure and features to ensure quality results.

Organizer:

Artificial Intelligence & Emerging Media (AIEM) Research Team at Boston University

Lei Guo, Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Studies

Kate Mays, PhD student of Emerging Media Studies

Margrit Betke, Professor of Computer Science

Mona Jalal, PhD student of Computer Science

Presenters:

Lei Guo, Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Studies

Kate Mays, PhD student of Emerging Media Studies

Margrit Betke, Professor of Computer Science

Hajo Boomgaarden, Professor of Empirical Social Science Methods, University of Vienna

Brendan Watson, Assistant Professor of Journalism, Michigan State University