Crowdsourcing for linguistic field research and e-learning

Crowdsourcing denotes the transfer of work commonly carried out by single humans to a large group of people. Nowadays, crowdsourcing is employed for many purposes, like people contributing their knowledge to Wikipedia, researchers predicting diseases from data on Twitter, or players solving protein folding problems in games. Still, there are areas for which the application of crowdsourcing has not yet been investigated thoroughly. This thesis examines crowdsourcing for two such areas: for empirical research in sciences oriented on humans -focusing on linguistic field research- and for e-learning. Sciences oriented on humans -like linguistics, sociology, or art history- depend on empirical research. For example, in traditional linguistic field research researchers ask questions and fill in forms. Such methods are time-consuming, costly, and not free of biases. This thesis proposes the application of crowdsourcing techniques to overcome these disadvantages and to support empirical research in getting more efficient. Therefore, the concept of a generic market for trading with symbolic goods and speculating on their characteristics in a playful manner, called Agora is introduced. Agora aims to be an "operating system" for social media applications gathering data. Furthermore, the Web-based crowdsourcing platform metropolitalia has been established for hosting two social media applications based upon Agora: Mercato Linguistico and Poker Parole. These applications have been conceived as part of this thesis for gathering complementary data and meta-data on Italian language varieties. Mercato Linguistico incites players to express their own knowledge or beliefs, Poker Parole incites players to make conjectures on the contributions of others. Thereby the primary meta-data collected with Mercato Linguistico are enriched with secondary, reflexive meta-data from Poker Parole, which are needed for studies on the perception of languages. An evaluation of the data gathered on metropolitalia exhibits the viability of the market-based approach of Agora and highlights its strengths. E-learning is concerned with the use of digital technology for learning, nowadays especially via the Internet. This thesis investigates how e-learning applications can support students with association-based learning and lecturers with teaching. For that, a game-like e-learning tool named Termina is proposed in this thesis. From the data collected with Termina association maps are constructed. An association map is a simplified version of a concept map, in which concepts are represented as rectangles and relationships between concepts as links. They constitute an abstract comprehension of a topic. Students profit from the association maps' availability, learn from other participating students, and can track their own learning progress. Lecturers gain insights into the knowledge and into potential misunderstandings of their students. An evaluation of Termina and the collected data along a university course exhibits Termina's usefulness for both students and lecturers. The main contributions of this thesis are (1) a literature review over collective intelligence, crowdsourcing, and related fields, (2) a model of a generic market for gathering data for empirical research efficiently, (3) two applications based on this model and results of an evaluation of the data gathered with them, (4) the game-like e-learning tool Termina together with insights from its evaluation, and (5) a generic software architecture for all aforementioned applications.