Draw A Dancing Figure, Mechanical Turk!

The first thing I want to explore is how people understand the notion of “dance”. Even though the word “dance” occurs in conversations frequently, dance can range from everyday movements to choreographed performances.

I think an effective way to understand the notion of dance among different individuals is to ask them to draw it. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. Inspired by Aaron Koblin’s The Sheep Market project, in which he collected 10,000 sheep drawing by paying $0.02 per piece on Mechanical Turk, I created my own Mechanical Turk drawing task:

My first task batch went up on Mechanical Turks for 8 hours last night and I got 11 awesome drawings! I just posted another batch that will run for 7 days, I’ll share the images that I have collected soon.

Meanwhile, you can show me your dancer sketch and make money on Mechanical Turk!

P.S. An interesting observation is that these dance drawings’s copyright belongs to me. Per Amazon Mechanical Turk Participation Agreement “As a Provider, the Requester for whom you provide Services is your client, and as such, you agree that the work product of any Services you perform is deemed a “work made for hire” for the benefit of the Requester, and all ownership rights, including worldwide intellectual property rights, will vest with the Requester immediately upon your performance of the Service.”

Update 3/1

The final results are out! I received 64 drawings in total. Many of them are beautifully drawn. I was surprised that turkers spent an average of 4 minutes and 15 seconds to complete the task (that’s an effective hourly wage of $3.91!), especially considering that they had complete freedom on deciding how much effort to put into the task. The amount of time turkers invested in the task seemed to indicate that they enjoyed doing the drawing more than just a way to make money.

You can view these interesting works on my flickr. I am curious to see which drawings get the most favs.