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I have completed my first Mechanical Turk HIT as a requester. The organization I am building this for would like to extend my HIT to ask the Turkers questions about time. However, for any of these time questions to make sense, we'd like to know what time zone they are located in.

So far, I have come up with two potential solutions:

1.) Ask the Turker.

2.) Implement a Javascript routine to grab the time zone off their browser.

It would be nice if the Mechanical Turk system itself allowed me to grab meta-data (either during the HIT, or ex post facto based on the WorkerId field I receive.) Does anything like this exist? I have read a few of the docs, but not come across anything helpful.

Thank you very much.

Brian Stinar
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1 Answers1

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Mturk doesn't provide meta-data at that level, so I think one of the two options you mentioned would work just fine.

Asking the worker is the easiest on your part, but you'll have to assume that some workers may choose the incorrect timezone. This is not a slight against Turkers - only humans in general :)

I'd say you might be better off using the javascript method getTimezoneOffset() as mentioned in this answer though it's still not clear to me if you need to account for daylight savings.

I'm adding this to our todos and will repost what solution we implemented when we do so.

Community
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Chris Conley
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  • Sorry, I see my last comment was ambiguous. My company, houdiniapi.com, runs on top of Mturk. What I meant is that we'd like to start capturing this data in our hits, so when we do so, I'll share the solution we came up with. – Chris Conley Aug 07 '12 at 12:34
  • I ended up just asking the Turkers for their time zone. Later, I asked a question about a time, and then did an offset calculation based on the zone they provided to get their time in mine (in a stand alone Python program.) Thanks. – Brian Stinar Aug 26 '12 at 04:12