Embedded reproduction in platform data work

Posada, Julian

doi:10.1080/1369118x.2022.2049849

Cited by 32 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…We expected this under-researched geographical and linguistic setting to reveal aspects that previous studies, mostly focused on the English-speaking world, might have missed, and we also aimed to compare higher- with middle-to-lower income countries. Latin America also includes the exceptional case of Venezuela, where an extremely severe economic and political crisis has pushed many people toward international platform work (Posada, 2022 ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The mean earning estimate (including unpaid work time) ranges from $2.1 per hour (Berg et al, 2018 ) to $3.3 (ILO, 2022 ). Although these platforms offer a way to complement other sources of income or even make a living, notably for women with care duties, microworkers lack fundamental labor rights and basic safe working conditions (Posada, 2022 ; Wood et al, 2019 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Research Ethics in the Age of Digital Platforms

et al. 2023

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Scientific research is growingly increasingly reliant on "microwork" or "crowdsourcing" provided by digital platforms to collect new data. Digital platforms connect clients and workers, charging a fee for an algorithmically managed workflow based on Terms of Service agreements. Although these platforms offer a way to make a living or complement other sources of income, microworkers lack fundamental labor rights and basic safe working conditions, especially in the Global South. We ask how researchers and research institutions address the ethical issues involved in considering microworkers as "human participants." We argue that current scientific research fails to treat microworkers in the same way as in-person human participants, producing de facto a double morality: one applied to people with rights acknowledged by states and international bodies (e.g., the Helsinki Declaration), the other to guest workers of digital autocracies who have almost no rights at all. We illustrate our argument by drawing on 57 interviews conducted with microworkers in Spanish-speaking countries.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Research Ethics in the Age of Digital Platforms

et al. 2023

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“…Dependency on the platforms is exacerbated by the high unemployment levels and reduced government support during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this situation, workers have limited access to subsidies and pay for services such as healthcare from their income [65]. For example, Olivia, one of the Tasksource workers, was diagnosed with diabetes and has to self-fund the costs of insulin.…”

Section: Poverty and Dependencementioning

confidence: 99%

The Data-Production Dispositif

Miceli¹,

Posada²

2022

Preprint

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Machine learning (ML) depends on data to train and verify models. Very often, organizations outsource processes related to data work (i.e., generating and annotating data and evaluating outputs) through business process outsourcing (BPO) companies and crowdsourcing platforms. This paper investigates outsourced ML data work in Latin America by studying three platforms in Venezuela and a BPO in Argentina. We lean on the Foucauldian notion of dispositif to define the data-production dispositif as an ensemble of discourses, actions, and objects strategically disposed to (re)produce power/knowledge relations in data and labor. Our dispositif analysis comprises the examination of 210 data work instruction documents, 55 interviews with data workers, managers, and requesters, and participant observation. Our findings show that discourses encoded in instructions reproduce and normalize the worldviews of requesters. Precarious working conditions and economic dependency alienate workers, making them obedient to instructions. Furthermore, discourses and social contexts materialize in artifacts, such as interfaces and performance metrics, limiting workers' agency and normalizing specific ways of interpreting data. We conclude by stressing the importance of counteracting the data-production dispositif by fighting alienation and precarization, and empowering data workers to become assets in the quest for high-quality data.

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“…Digital technoculture is all metaphor and all material. As online sites relocate our sense of situatedness, metaphor threatens to overshadow the material sites and lived conditions of mining, construction, assembly, circulation, waste, and so on, that support digital infrastructure, and obscures their geopolitical, industrial, and environmental consequences (Gajjala 2013;Hogan 2015Hogan , 2018Roberts 2016Roberts , 2019Nakamura 2014;Duarte 2017;Posada 2022;Grohmann and Qui 2020). Metaphor's abstraction can serve to absolve privileged technocultural participants from addressing, for example, the hazardous "labor of extracting and disposing of digital technologies" (Noble 2016).…”

Section: Legacies and Extensionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Metaphors as Meaning and Method in Technoculture

Cowan

Rault

2022

Catalyst

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Metaphors are critical sites of analysis for feminist scholars of science and technology because of what they both conceal and divulge about the conditions of their historical emergence and the persistence of those conditions. As researchers and editors, we find ourselves oriented to work that takes up the task of contesting uncontested metaphors, considering how metaphor “invades” (Tuck & Yang 2012, 3) and evacuates meaning. This Special Section carries on the dynamic practice in feminist STS of taking the work, and ambivalent potentiality, of metaphor seriously. In this Introduction, we draw together scholarship that informs what we identify as the "metaphor-work" of feminist STS—the work of allegory, myth, metaphor, figurative and associative discourse, and their analysis—as central to the methods by which we make and remake meanings that matter to feminist technocultures. Throughout the metaphor-work collected here, the contributors propose that paradigm change comes through the collective refusal of some metaphors, through the re-evaluation of others, and the introduction of new metaphorical frames and figures to reorient our work.

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Embedded reproduction in platform data work

Cited by 32 publications

References 29 publications

Research Ethics in the Age of Digital Platforms

Research Ethics in the Age of Digital Platforms

The Data-Production Dispositif

Introduction: Metaphors as Meaning and Method in Technoculture

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