Public Search Interfaces to Plant Collections & Exploring Social Norms with the Crowd

Public Search Interfaces to Plant Collections
Tim Stutt

I’ll present a brief initial progress report on my master’s project on Search Interfaces for Plant Collections. I’ll present the project overview, initial secondary research, comparative analysis, and ethnographic research for personae development.

Exploring Social Norms with the Crowd: A Reflection on Methods, Participation, and Reliability
Catherine Marshall

Crowdsourcing services such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) provide new venues for recruiting participants and conducting studies; hundreds of surveys may be available to workers at any given time. I will reflect on seven related studies Frank Shipman and I performed on MTurk over a three-year period. The studies used a combination of open-ended questions and structured hypothetical statements about story-like scenarios (a technique borrowed from legal education) to engage the efforts of 1,493 participants. I'll describe the methods we used to elicit social norms and reflect on what we’ve learned about MTurk as a survey venue. I’ll also talk about apparent trends in data reliability, especially when the surveys are seen from a worker’s perspective. This talk describes work done in collaboration with Frank Shipman at Texas A&M University.