Friday, March 12, 2010

Data Crunch

I stumbled across this interesting article that crunches data about Girl Talk's album Feed the Animals. 

Some of the data is what you would expect (list of samples from the whole album, number samples per song, etc.) but they take the data further and also chart the start times of each sample across each song, the median year the samples from each track came from, and the actual sample release dates for each track.  
 
The most interesting thing to me was the fact that a lot of the data was crunched using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. I had never head of this before today, but Mechanical Turk describes itself as a "marketplace for work that requires human intelligence". It seems like you can sign up to do small tasks that take a very short period of time for minimal amounts of money.  For example, I stumbled across another site called The Sheep Market that is collecting 10,000 drawings of sheep by online workers for $.02 a piece.
Anyhow, I think the whole Mechanical Turk thing is pretty interesting and I don't know why I hadn't heard of it before now because it sounds like it's been around for awhile.  If anybody has ever done it or looks into it more, let me know what you find out about how it works.

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