Now that we’ve setup our AWS and MTurk accounts and added funds that can be used on MTurk, we can start using Task Magic to submit tasks. To start, login to Task Magic with the Account Id, Access Key and Secret Key you copied during the account setup step.

When you select Get Started, the app will first check to make sure your account is setup properly.

Now, you can select one of the available tasks to use. To get started, let’s use the Sentiment Analysis task. When we select it from the drop down, we can now see a list of the required fields to use this task.

The Sentiment Analysis task simply requires a text value to work. So we can now create a Table containing the data we want to submit. To get started, let’s enter some data into Excel with “text” as the header so that it matches the field requested by Task Magic. For our data, we’ll use some simple phrases that we want Workers to evaluate for sentiment.

To submit this data in Task Magic we will first want to convert it to a table with “text” as the header. Select the to be submitted and go to the Insert tab in Excel. Select Table from the Insert ribbon and when prompted indicate that your table has headers.

Excel will convert your data to a Table with “text” as the header.

Now you can submit your data to MTurk using Task Magic. Select anywhere in your table and click on the Publish button in Task Magic. Task Magic will add two columns to your data. The first is a TaskId column that is a unique identifier for the task you’ve submitted to MTurk. To not delete this column or change the header since this necessary to get the results of your task. The other let’s you know the state of each task.

 

To retrieve your results, select the Get Results tab in Task Magic and click the Get Results button. If your task is still being worked on by Workers the status will continue to display “processing”, you can try again in a few minutes. If your tasks are complete the status will update to “completed” and a new column will be added containing the sentiment that Workers thought was expressed by each statement.

To process additional text phrases, simply add additional rows to your table and Publish again. Task Magic will only submit rows that don’t have a TaskId value.