R Client for the MTurk Requester API

MTurkR provides programmatic access to the crowdsourcing functionality of the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) Requester API.

Amazon provides a helpful chart for deciding whether an API client (like MTurkR) is useful for yor project.

Possible applications of the package include:

• Survey or experimental research using MTurk workers as human subjects
• Large-scale human coding or categorization of text, images, video, audio, or other files
• Collection of unstructured data from the web
• Audio and video transcription
• Preprocessing of "messy" data prior to statistical procedures

The MTurkR documentation files contain minimal examples for all functions. Further examples of how to use MTurkR are provided in the MTurkR GitHub wiki. Users can contribute their own examples or further documentation there, or via pull requests to the GitHub repository.

Using MTurkR requires setting two environment variables: AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY. These can be specified on the command-line when initializing one's R session, using Sys.setenv() within R, or by placing these values in an .Renviron or Rprofile.site file. (Note: this functionality is a more secure replacmeent of the use of the credentials() function or options("MTurkR.keypair") from earlier versions of MTurkR.)

As a supplemental feature to MTurkR, there is also a graphical user interface available for the package. A simple, command-line version of this is available using the wizard.simple() function in MTurkR. A more advanced GUI, built using Tcl/tk is available in MTurkRGUI package.

If you experience problems using MTurkR, you can:

• Report issues on Github
• Contact the package maintainer via email or on Twitter

Installation

To install the latest version from CRAN, simply use:

install.packages("MTurkR")

To install the latest development version of MTurkR from GitHub:

# latest stable version
install.packages("MTurkR", repos = c(getOption("repos"), "http://cloudyr.github.io/drat"))

# latest (unstable) version from GitHub
if(!require("ghit")){
    install.packages("ghit")
}
ghit::install_github("leeper/MTurkR")