UNEVOC Connect

Projects in microwork (MW) are outsourced to crowdwork platforms by clients and broken down into small units of work to be carried out for pay. Microtasks – such as image tagging, data entry, social media sentiment ratings, survey execution, and transcription – can typically be completed in seconds or minutes and require basic computer literacy. Such tasks are usually monitored by algorithms rather than humans, in an emergent mode of work supervision termed ‘algorithmic management’. There has been a recent surge in the use of microwork in processing big data sets for training machine learning algorithms underpinning artificial intelligence (AI).