Fred Benenson

Bio

While studying philosophy and computer science, Fred co-founded the Free Culture @ NYU chapter of Students for Free Culture, an international student movement focused on copyright reform, technology advocacy, and digital activism. In April 2008 Fred launched his thesis for his masters at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program named Cause Caller; a web service designed to help citizens organize virtual phone banks using VoIP-based telephony and a semantic media wiki.

He is currently employed as Creative Commons' product manager developing products and does outreach for the organization’s licenses and projects. In early 2009 Fred began working as an honorary
research associate at Eyebeam in collaboration with senior resident Michael Mandiberg to curate contemporary art into the commons. During the fall of 2009, Fred began teaching as an adjunct instructor at NYU’s department of Media, Culture and Communication. This semester he is teaching “Copyright, Commerce and Culture." He enjoys experimenting with large data sets and using Amazon Mechanical
Turk as a platform for creative expression.

Abstract

Emoji Dick
In this talk I will detail two projects I'm developing using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The first project asked Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to come up with more Mehcanical Turk Human Intelligence Tasks ("HITs"). After accumulating 215 tasks, I created a new HIT where workers could evaluate each task on its originality, how likely they'd participate in it, and what a fair price they would pay another worker for it would be.  The resulting aggregate form of this data provides a meta-view of Turker's individual creative and economic proclivities.

The other project I'll be discussing is called Emoji Dick, and uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk to translate Herman Melville's Moby Dick into Japanese emoticons called emoji. The payment for this task has itself been sourced from another crowd using the site Kickstarter, which provides payment and promotional infrastructure for funding small and large projects via the crowd. In my talk I will discuss the motivations and problems implicated by this work, as well as a the technical and methodological details of how I'm executing it.