Dear Dr. Terence Love,

Thanks for your message. I am still in the process of defining my research
problem and proposal so you may find my reply bit vague:

I am concentrating on low-literacy and low-technology environments in India
and Sub-Saharan Africa where people have in recent times (say in past one
year or so) have started to access the digital material primarily through
mobile Internet after years of digital exclusion. I am focusing on two
models of crowd-sourcing: first, micro-tasks based crowdsourcing (for
instance, image tagging, identifying objects within images etc) on platforms
like Mechanical Turks or at startups like samasource.org or desicrew.in,
 and second crowd-sourcing for local reporting (for instance, local health
information collection). Many of these crowd-sourcing initiatives have
exclusively focused to engage users belonging to the low-literacy and
low-technology environments.

I am trying to define my research to explore and locate the role of social
capital, learning, value of information, benefits, interaction design
approaches etc of these crowd-sourcing models and initiatives from the
perspective of a local community.

I welcome any suggestion, criticism, opinion from members of PHD-design
list.


Best Regards,
Abhigyan

web: http://abhigyan.info/
linkedin: http://nl.linkedin.com/in/agsingh

Design Researcher,
Multimedia Information Retrieval Lab,
Delft University of Technology (TU Delft),
The Netherlands
Web: http://dmirlab.tudelft.nl/

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 7:21 PM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Dear Abhigyan,
> Sounds an interesting area.
> What is the problem your research will address?
> Best wishes,
> Terry
>
> On 19/10/2011, at 7:15 AM, abhigyan singh wrote:
>
> > Dear all,
> >
> > I am writing my doctoral studies proposal on the theme of
> > interdisciplinary research on crowd-sourcing in low-literacy and
> > low-technology contexts in emerging markets (India & Sub-Saharan Africa).
> >
> > I request for pointers to research papers, links, case studies etc
> > which discuss aspects related to the subject. Some themes: Community
> > Informatics & Crowd-sourcing, Social Design & Actor Network Theory,
> > Cultural dimensions & design of ICT-Interfaces, research incorporating
> > both 'real-world' social network and 'virtual' social network, Ethics
> > and Economics of Crowd-sourcing,  Social Capital & ICTD.
> >
> > Your directions will be very helpful. If you are aware of any research
> > lab/university conducting similar research then please share the
> > information.
> >
> > Thanks in advance!
> >
> > Best Regards,
> > Abhigyan Singh
> >
> > web: http://abhigyan.info/ <http://nl.linkedin.com/in/agsingh>
> >
> >
> > Design Researcher,
> >
> > Multimedia Information Retrieval Lab,
> >
> > Delft University of Technology (TU Delft),
> >
> > HB11.320, Mekelweg 4, 2628 CD, Delft,
> >
> > The Netherlands
> >
> > Web: http://dmirlab.tudelft.nl/
>