Clickworkers as a study in Distributing Expert Work

On Feb.6 2008 I presented my early work on the NASA Clickworkers interface at the UMich Science, Technology and Medicine Studies speaker series. Below is my abstract.

Redistributing Professional Vision: Of Practice and Expertise in Classifying Craters

This presentation focuses on the case of NASA Clickworkers, a web-based interface in which “average users” classify literally millions of cosmological images.

I will explore this technology with respect to the notion of “professional vision” as it has been formulated within practice-centered studies of science. Through Clickworkers, software engineers restructure relations of expertise, relocating proficiency at the site of design and distributing generic training and “human informational tasks” to anonymous users.

In the second part of this presentation I will turn to the emerging base of engineering knowledge that seeks to systematize the production of such software platforms.

In January I presented a similar talk as a guest lecture at Georgetown University's Communication, Culture and Technology Program.