README.md
In hadley/mturkr: Tools to work with Amazon's mechanical turk.

mturkr package

The mturkr package makes it easy to construct Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) human interface tasks (HITs). It makes it easy to create templated questions, submit to amazon, monitor, review and aggregate answers.

It echoes the design of Amazon's command line tools, but mapping components of the API to data structures and file formats that R developers and more familiar with.

Important terms:

HIT: a single question
HIT Type or Task: a group of questions of the same form
Assignment: one question assigned to a person

init_task - initialises a task directory with basic directory structure
publish_task - combines questions.xml and template.csv to and publishes all HITs
view_task - opens web browser pointing to one of your HITs
review_task - downloads assignments needing review, and approves/rejects according to value of status column
unpublish_task - removes all published HITs (in case you've made a mistake or were just testing)

Other useful functions include:

get_balance to see how much money you have left.

Note that all these functions take a directory as their first argument (if you omit the directory it will use the last directory mturkr saw, so you can save some typing).

By default all work is done in the sandbox. When you are ready to publish your questions to real workers, set Host: production in your DESCRIPTION file.

A task is represented as a set of files in a directory (see below for details).

All functions are robust to broken connections and errors, and are hence idempotent (if a function has no errors, running it again will do nothing). If successful, each request appends a row to a csv file, otherwise stop()s on failure.

All functions have quiet option. If FALSE (the default), are pretty wordy - describing each HTTP request.

All tasks work in the sandbox until you specifically indicate otherwise.

Each task lives in its own directory with files:

User created: