Task Design and Crowd Sentiment in Biocollections Information Extraction

Citizen science projects have successfully taken advantage of volunteers to unlock scientific information contained in images. Crowds extract scientific data by completing different types of activities: transcribing text, selecting values from pre-defined options, reading data aloud, or pointing and clicking at graphical elements. While designing crowdsourcing tasks, selecting the best form of input and task granularity is essential for keeping the volunteers engaged and maximizing the quality of the results. In the context of biocollections information extraction, this study compares three interface actions (transcribe, select, and crop) and tasks of different levels of granularity (single field vs. compound tasks). Using 30 crowdsourcing experiments and two different populations, these interface alternatives are evaluated in terms of speed, quality, perceived difficulty and enjoyability. The results show that Selection and Transcription tasks generate high quality output, but they are perceived as boring. Conversely, Cropping tasks, and arguably graphical tasks in general, are more enjoyable, but their output quality depend on additional machine-oriented processing. When the text to be extracted is longer than two or three words, Transcription is slower than Selection and Cropping. When using compound tasks, the overall time required for the crowdsourcing experiment is considerably shorter than using single field tasks, but they are perceived as more difficult. When using single field tasks, both the quality of the output and the amount of identified data are slightly higher compared to compound tasks, but they are perceived by the crowd as less entertaining.