WHAT TURKEE CAN DO

• Perform user feedback studies easily. http://i.imgur.com/wIU40BAl.png

• Seamlessly convert your Rails forms for use on Mechanical Turk.

• Easily import the data posted by the Mechanical Turk workers back into your data models.

External forms are created using a simple form helper. HITs are created by issuing a rake command. Retrieving submitted response data and importing that data into your model(s) requires just one more rake command.

INSTALL/UPGRADE

Add turkee to your Gemfile as a gem dependency, then do a 'bundle install':

gem 'turkee'

If you're upgrading Turkee (1.1.1 and prior) or installing for the first time, run:

rails g turkee --skip

(the skip flag will ensure that you don't overwrite prior Turkee initializers and migrations.)

This will copy the needed migrations and config/initializer into your application directory.

To access the Turkee rake tasks, add the following to your application's Rakefile: require 'tasks/turkee'

If you haven't created a Mechanical Turk account, surf on over to Amazon's Web Services and create an AWS account.

Once you have your account created, you can access your AWS access key and secret access key from here.

CONFIGURATION

Inside the config/initializers directory, you'll see the file turkee.rb. Edit the file with your Amazon credentials.

AWSACCESSKEYID      = 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'
AWSSECRETACCESSKEY  = 'YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY'

RTurk::logger.level     = Logger::DEBUG
RTurk.setup(AWSACCESSKEYID, AWSSECRETACCESSKEY, :sandbox => (Rails.env == 'production' ? false : true))

Run the migrations :

rake db:migrate

BASIC FORMS

1. You should disable form controls if the Turker hasn't accepted the HIT. You can determine this from your controller: class SurveysController < ApplicationController

    def new
        @disabled      = Turkee::TurkeeFormHelper::disable_form_fields?(params)
   
        # If you wanted to find the associated turkee_task, you could do a find by hitId
        #  Not necessary in a simple example.
        # @turkee_task   = Turkee::TurkeeTask.find_by_hit_id(params[:hitId]).id rescue nil
   
        ...
        @survey        = Survey.new
    end
   

2. Change your forms to use the form helper.

   <%= turkee_form_for(@survey, params) do |f| %>

   <%= f.text_area :value, :disabled => @disabled %>

   <%= f.submit 'Create', :disabled => @disabled %>

   <% end %>

Using the turkee_form_for helper will post the form to the Mechanical Turk sandbox if you're in development/test mode, otherwise it will be posted to Mechanical Turk production/live site.

3. Run the following rake task to post to Mechanical Turk :

   Host URL of your application

   Title of your HIT

   Description of your HIT

   Model name of your task form (the New action should be implemented)

   Number of assignments for HIT

   The reward for a successful completion

   The lifetime of the HIT in days (e.g. 5 days)

   rake turkee:post_hit[,