THE SOUL OF THE INTERNET
An ON SCREEN Research Report
Art in the Age of Social Participation on the Mega Scale: Using Crowdsourcing for your Projects
By Shelly Farnham, Ph.D.
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Jordan Schwartz, local bee keeping blogger and social technologist, notes that in the course of its life, a bee generates ½ a teaspoon of honey in the course of its life. And yet, the hive produces up to ten gallons in a year. Similarly people are swarming onto the Internet, each adding their own small amounts of content, and yet generating collections of new media on the mega scale. For example, by the end of 2007 Technorati was tracking over 70 million blogs, by the end of 2007 Flickr hosted over 2 billion photos, and as of April 2008 YouTube had 83 million videos.
In 2006, Time Magazine declared “you” the person of the year because of this recent, spectacular proliferation of user-generated content online. There’s a growing sense of empowerment with average consumers playing an active, rather than passive role in generating the media they are consuming, outside of the editorial control of the TV networks, newspapers, and magazines.
While sitting upon these mega-collections of social media, new media artists are asking themselves, how can we leverage the amazing amount of social activity and content sharing happening online? Out sourcing tasks to large crowds– also known as crowdsourcing — provides a way to overcome the bottlenecks in any one individual’s time and singularity of experience. The question remains, aside from allowing people to generate large volumes of content (it would be very difficult for any one individual to produce millions of photos), what are the advantages of tapping into all this online participation?
Finding Large Scale Social Meaning at Microsoft Research
To explore this question I first visited Scott Counts, Ph.D., a researcher in the Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment (VIBE) group at Microsoft Research. Counts has been studying ways to harness the power of collective social behavior.
Counts pointed out that there are many tasks that are hard for a computer to accomplish, yet easy for humans, and with the age of the Internet you can farm these tasks out on a large scale through crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing allows you to leverage mass collaboration to achieve your goals, generally through micropayments for repetitive tasks.
What kinds of tasks might you crowdsource because they are hard for computers, but easy for humans? Initial types of crowdsourced tasks tended to be fairly mechanistic, such as finding craters on Mars, or labeling photos. One web site in particular, ESP, encourages people to label pictures in the form of a game, where people earn points by accurately predicting how others would label the picture. In this way, ESP has been able to generate large volumes of labeled photos.
Counts is exploring more sophisticated tasks, with more sophisticated outputs – for example there is an immense amount of data online, which relate together in socially meaningful ways that can only be found through human interpretation. They implemented a research project called Pathfinder that allows “citizen scientists” to submit their own data, and then annotate and share interesting data trends, for example the relationship between gas prices and the Dow Jones. The ultimate goal is to harness collections of data, add social meaning, and contribute to the collective knowledge. Anyone can add their own data, which can be aggregated with other people’s data, from whicheven more people can browse for new, meaningful relationships. According to Scott Counts the main problem is “how to combine community input with analysis on the backend to come up with something useful.”
Another core problem, Counts says, is aggregating and visualizing large scale social participation as it occurs. In another project, called Narratives, Counts’ colleagues Danyel Fisher, Ph.D. and Aaron Hoff (also in VIBE) are exploring ways to visualize the real-time collective narrative of the blogosphere. Using a service from Live Labs to provide streams of data, they show frequency of keyword terms over time. See screenshot in Figure 1. These visualizations show most common terms in the span of the last day, the last half hour, or even in the last heard beat (at the bottom of the screenshot, Figure 1). In this way you can see, at a glance, the prominent topics of the blogosphere at any given time.
Figure 1: Narratives, from Microsoft Research
These two projects illustrate harnessing micro-contributions in social behavior to provide larger meaning about what is happening in the world. Another possible use for large scale aggregation of social participation is collective action toward a social good.
Creating Collective Social Good on The Darfur Wall
Jonah Burke provides beautiful examples of designing for social participation toward a social good. Jonah has a computer science background, and while working at Microsoft as a Program Manager he wanted to do a project that had a sustainable impact. He thought Darfur was a cause worthy of attention—in Darfur, Sudan, over 400,000 people have died as victims of genocide at the hands of the Sudanese government and Janjaweed militias.
Jonah, with his brother and father Dan and Matt Burke, decided to create a virtual monument showing a wall inscribed with 400,000 numbers, each representing a person who has been killed.See Figure 2. “By donating one dollar, you can light one number and honor one lost life.” See darfurwall.org.
The Darfur Wall was inspired by the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial—The Wall—in Washington DC. Jonah said the Darfur Wall was designed to be similarly moving by being stark, in simple black and white, easy to use, and inspiring touch. When you donate to the cause, you “write on the wall,” lighting a number, and connecting you to the cause.See Figure 3. Donations are given to the The Darfur Foundation, a non-profit corporation, whose sole aim is to raise money to support peace in Darfur.
After a year and half, the Darfur Wall project has raised over $93,000, with 4426 people donating from $1 to $1000 at a time. Jonah notes that some of the money came from people who were inspired by the project to engage in fundraising efforts. As you browse around the Darfur Wall, you experience not only the sheer immensity of the genocide, but also the hope inspired by seeingas the wall lights up that thousands of people have contributed.
Figure 2: The Darfur Wall. Each number represents one of 400k people who died from the genocide in Darfur.
Figure 3: The Darful Wall. As people donate to the Darfur Foundation, a number representing a genocide victim lights up.
Jonah has now returned to graduate school to further study computer science, but inspired by their success with the Darfur Wall project he has partnered with a non-profit group, Child Advocacy 360, devoted to ending child abuse and neglect, to start Gardensforgrowing.org. They use the community garden as a metaphor for bringing up children in a positive way. In Gardensforgrowing.org, when you donate you may pick a spot in the garden and grow a flower.See Figure 4. You may pan around, click on other flowers, see who planted them and how long they have been growing, keeping people involved over time. As with the Darfur Wall, the hope is that you are also inspiredto donate as you see the garden become lush with flowers, representing the microcontributions of thousands of people toward a good cause.
Figure 4. Gardens for Growing.
Jonah believes that technology applied the right way can have a very positive impact. He points out that the Darfur Wall’s success is largely due to the promotion they achieved through online word of mouth. They were able to create a much bigger splash than could have been achieved, from people in the blogosphere communicating and sharing their excitement towards the project.
Generating Global Art in Mechanical Turk
Aside from harnessing social meaning or large-scale good, we may also harness the human’s capacity for creativity through crowdsourcing. There are a number of examples of this. One such project is called Electric Sheep, a collaborative screen saver that has evolved into a work of art through the cross-pollination of individual abstract visualizations, called “sheep,” morphing and evolving into a collective “android dream.” Another such example is the Sheep Market, a web site with 10,000 sheep drawn by workers who were recruited through Mechanical Turk. Mechanical Turk, based in Seattle and owned by Amazon.com, is a system set up to enable crowdsourcing. The sheep market is an archetypal example: by paying people two cents at a time, its creator Aaron Koblin was able to acquire 10,000 sheep. See Figure 5.
Figure 5: The Sheep Market, showing 10,000 sheep drawn for .02 cents each.
Inspired by the sheep market project, I decided to explore how I might use Mechanical Turk myself to generate creative content. Mechanical Turk gives you access to people from all over the world, 24 hours a day. Through Mechanical Turk you may submit a work request, called a HIT for “Human Intelligence Task”. For example, you might submit a HIT “tell a joke”, and then specify you are willing to pay $10 to get 500 of them at 2 cents each. Mechanical Turk serves as a form of broker, where you prepay to Mechanical Turk enough money to pay for the work request, and then as people complete your HITs and you approvetheir submissions, Mechanical Turk gives them the money.
For several days, I brainstormed with colleagues. “If you could get lots of people from all over the world to do a task for an art project for very little money, what would you have them do?” I heard a number of great ideas, including “Get a whole bunch of pictures of cats, and make a collage of a giant cat.” “Take a picture, cut it up into pieces, and then have different people paint the basic form in each piece, and then put it all back together again.” “Have 100 people from around the world send a postcard to your lover saying you love them.”
I decided, because On Screen is a magazine of 911 Media Arts Center, which has a film focus, to have people from all over the world create short video clips. I was fascinated by the notion that there is no knowing or predicting where people in Mechanical Turk are from—they could be from anywhere around the world. My task was for them to take short, 10-second video clips of their favorite walks to gain a sense of where they were all from.
I submitted my HIT, “take video of your favorite walk”, said I’d pay $1 each for up to five videos from each person, submitted my credit card, and sat back to see what would happen.
Within a week I had almost a hundred short video clips from around the world, including walks on sunny beaches, walks in snowy woods, walks that watched cars go by in urban environements, and walks to British Museums, taken from all over the world all within the same week.
I sorted through all of these short video clips, speculating on where they came from while piecing them together in a grid so I could simultaneously experience walks from across the globe.See Figure 6. I found myself thinking not only may you crowdsource for human intelligence, social good, and creativity – you may crowdsource for the human experience itself, one micro-walk at a time across the globe.
In writing this article it became clear to me the artist’s role in crowdsourced projects is to create a scaffold or infrastructure upon which others express their creativity. A well-architected project will hang all the micro-contributions onto the scaffold in a way that effectively communicates the interesting emergent patterns in human behaviors. The success of the project depends on the skillof the architect using crowdsourcing as a creative medium, designing forsoliciting social participation on the large scale and displaying aggregated results in a meaningful, compelling way.
Figure 6: A grid of short “taking a walk” video clips, taken around the world and submitted through
Mechanical Turk.
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Shelly Farnham, Ph.D. is co-founder and social architect at Waggle Labs, a company dedicated to enhancing people’s social experiences through innovative technologies. She is also the lead of the overlords committee of Dorkbot Seattle, a monthly meeting of “people who do strange things with electricity” at 911 Media Arts Center.