User:Lassebosch/2ndyr/Read/Write

12:24, 10 December 2013 (CET)

GRADUATION PROPOSAL

What you will encounter below is my latest graduation proposal. In the bottom of this document you will find a link to my previous proposals

v.0.6 Click-workers, Cognitive Surplus and Digital Gateways

Before outlining the final project proposal I would like to explain the background for my concerns and interests.

Please verify that you are a human-being - General introduction

When wanting to comment upon a topic within the forum you are browsing, one is often prompted by the following:

The mechanism you are going trough is a so called 'reCAPTCHA' stemming from the 'CAPTCHA'-technology, an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". As the naming indicates the technology tries to test whether you are a computer with potential malicious intentions, or a human-being wanting to comment on the forum.

'reCAPTCHA' and 'CAPTCHA' differs in a subtle, yet tremendous way. In the traditional 'CAPTCHA' you are presented an obscured string of letters, uninterpretable by a computer, but legible to the human eye. In the example above the 'CAPTCHA' is the first string of letters. I can decipher that is spells 'inersiW' while most computer-algorithms would fail in giving the right result if even any. The human is granted access while the computer is not.

The 're' in 'reCAPTCHA' is expressed in the second far more legible string of letters as seen the example above. In this case it spells 'obligation'.

Without further consideration you type in the solution; 'inersiW' and 'obligation', which gives you access to comment as much as you like.

Exchange at the Gateway

What the reCAPTCHA 'user' understands correctly is the man versus machine verification needed to root out malicious bots and 'software-gone-wrong'.

The Gateway According to Shutter Stock

The term 'user' might not be entirely fitting in this context, since the 'user', doesn't actually 'use' the reCAPTCHA-interface, rather the 'user' is a 'pass-byer', an asylum-seeker, searching to obtain access to the content on the other side. The system of the reCAPTCHA can therefore be looked upon as the gateway keeper, protecting the content on the other side. All pass-byers, computer or man, are told to produce a certain password, a human-verification, before passage is granted.

But what the vast majority of the reCAPTCHA pass-byers, fail to notice is that each time they post a solution, part of what they've been deciphering is a fragment, a word, of scanned book-page. You verify that you are a human but you also digitize a tiny piece of a book. The process of digitization hidden in plain sight, and pass-byers simply encounters this as yet another human-vs-computer security measurement. We don't pay any considerations to this 'micro-task'. In current example you just digitized 'obligation' from an unknown book.

Why not 'harness the cognitive surplus' of the crowd? Luis von Ahn, the inventor of the reCAPTCHA system (currently owned by Google) has an interesting quote on this: 'Basically, I want to make all of humanity more efficient by exploiting the human cycles that get wasted'. Why not utilize and take advantage of the human-brainpower which the pass-byer is all-ready employing to prove that he is human?

Taming the Crowd

An Uncontrollable Mob from the film Soylent Green

The Productive and Efficient Digital Crowd

The illustration of 'harnessing', 'surplus' and 'waste' and theur visual connotations of production and efficiency, links clearly to my previous research in Piet Zwart within the field of crowd sourcing. With the expansion of the Web and its pervasiveness in almost every online action of the 'modern-day-man', the term and idea of crowd-sourcing has gained a lot of traction. As an illustration, the crowd is no longer seen as an aggressive, amorph, mumbling and stumbling mob, hard to understand and despised and feared by the authorities. In 'crowd-sourcing' the crowd has been tamed and cropped, fitting a smoothly running production facility, outputting whatever desired. The crowd is not an actual physical crowd, but individuals represented as nodes on a network, all linking to each other but not necessarily communicating or directly working together, but eventually contributing to a coherent, final outcome. The fordist assembly-line has gone viral.

Returning to the reCAPTCHA, the crowd, the pass-byers, without noticing continues to complete parts of the enormous task of digitizing hundreds of millions of books. Each node contributing a piece of the puzzle each time passage trough the guarded gate is granted.

What exchange? A symbiotic relationship

On the other side of the gate, the pass-byer is no longer passing by. The other side is his destination, and it's here he does his initial deeds; writing a comment, sending a mail etc. His gain is access and fulfillment in various manners. The exchange between A) verifying that you are human and the less perceivable 'helping to digitize a library' and B) being able to write a message, is small and time-vise diminishing. The pass-byers less tangible needs to fulfill personal urges is exchanged for the minuscule, micro-task of digitizing a book-fragment. In this way there's an asymmetry present within the exchange which is not as easily measurable as a traditional 'time-wage'-scheme would be. The assembly-line is asymmetrical, the laborers and their salaries various, but since the nature of the work they all complete while passing the gate is of such universal format, it does no longer matter whether the each node look different, have a different background or different skills. Everything is accounted for, and one size fits all.

There's a clear symbiosis between the different parties: the pass-byers, the gateway-keeper and the other side. Each party wants something of the other party, and each pay in their own currency and gains another. An essential difference though clings to three intertwined parameters; amount, capability to accumulate and view-control.

I am not claiming to posses the final answer as to how and to what extent, these parameters are enforced, but if we consider that the pass-byer leaves a decrypted, digitized word in the possession of the gateway keeper each time he passes by, this quickly amounts. Especially since reCAPTCHA claims to accumulate more than a hundred million digitized words per day. Clearly an issue of scale is apparent here: the pass-byer is payed and spends the payment sending an email, while the gateway-keeper gets to accumulate huge amounts of data.

As goes for the 'view-control', questions can be asked as to whom this digitized material belongs to. The gateway-keeper or the nodes producing the mass? Under current circumstances the material is reserved to the gateway keeper and accessible in trough the Google-books-project. The nodes who amassed the database can view this project but only on the premise of the provider and the gateway-keeper, aka. Google.

Proposal: from exclusion and fragmentation to inclusion and communication

Taking a step back, looking at the reCAPTCHA-project in a less gloomy perspective, the system has many advantages and a real power trough its efficiency. Could the idea of 'harnessing the cognitive surplus' be put in a stronger ethical position? Would it make sense to engage the node more actively and socially in his digitalization of books, rather than wrapping the act of 'harnessing' in the excuse of determining your man or machine features? Why leave out any questions or interests raised from the actual human digitizing the fragment, and why render the human merely as a tweaked computer-algorithm? The slogan of reCAPTCHA: 'stop spam, read books' is currently a strange cloaking, but it could maybe become a lot stronger if turned inside-out.

In my graduation project so far I've been making various attempts to engage this relative new kind of on-line micro-based labor, taking place at times in very concealed and hardly considerable conditions. This of course asks what is work and when is it work? When does a task become a unconscious micro-task? And when does any on-line actions gain value of any sort?

Personally I'm both very intrigued by these processes and the potential power of them, yet I also hold a strong skepticism towards how they can be wielded toward exclusion of the individual, its labor and the fruit of it, overseer-ed, accumulated and 'locked-up' by the gateway-keeper.

I purpose to continue the work and research I've done on the reCAPTCHA-system. I wish to rebuild the reCAPTCHA in a state which will alter several aspects of the original. The idea of 'harnessing' and 'surplus' should change flavor to something less machine-like and more human-related. Options (not necessary succeeding each other):

• Books being translated are provided by 'Project Gutenberg' and released into the public domain (Again)

• As a pass-byer you will see the word as a fragment, but you will also see the title of the book and the chapter , and you will be able to digitize more than a fragment.

• As a pass-byer you will see the fragment you are to translate but you will also see a larger context; eg. the page of the word you translate

• As a pass-byer you will, hopefully become more than a pass-byer

• You can chose a book that you want to 'stick to' by digitizing word by word chronologically. Each time you return to the re-reCAPTCHA you will be presented next word of the same book

• More users can engage in translating the same book by 'sticking to' the same book and thereby 'share the job'

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