Using Crowdsourcing to Measure Complex Social Concepts

I am an investigator on a project that experiments with large-scale, Web-based crowdsourcing (e.g., Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) to collect data on complex social science concepts, a task that had previously been the domain of expert coders.  Although the process is generalizable to many data collection efforts, we test the feasibility of using crowdsourcing in future updates to the Militarized Interstate Dispute database.  This project has received seed funding from Penn State's Social Science Research Initiative in the amount of $20,000 with the expectation that we pursue future NSF grants.  The multidisciplinary team is comprised of myself, Glenn Palmer (Political Science), David Reitter (Information Sciences and Technology), and Michael Schmierbach (Communications), each of whom (other than me) are faculty at Penn State.

Here's a copy of our SSRI application.
IRB submission.
IRB approval.

Militarized Interstate Dispute 4.0 (MID4)

MID is one of the most, if not the most, widely used conflict datasets in IR.  The MID4 project extends this dataset nine years, from 2002-2010.  I have worked extensively on the MID 4.0 project for PI Glenn Palmer; many of the details of our work can be found in Separating the Wheat from the Chaff.