Speech Cats Training Manual: PVSWiki

Speech Cats Training Manual

Overview:

We have recently integrated categories into the speeches portion of our website. This will make it easier for users to navigate our website and browse through the speeches that most interest them. Not only are we categorizing new speeches, but we are going back through all the speeches in our database and categorizing and tagging them. Your job is to read or skim through our historical speeches and to assign the most relevant categories and tags relating to each speech.

How to Get There and What to Do:

Go to admin.votesmart.org. In the left side panel, click the "Speeches" link under "Categorization." Skim over the text and find the main topics of the speech. Then click in the Categories search field and start typing the category. A drop down list of the categories will appear below and you can choose the relevant category. Choose the categories that apply to the speech. Then click in the Tags search field and add any tags that may apply. Use tags to create a link to highlight more specific issues, legislation, etc. Then click the blue "Save and get another" button.

When you click the Categories field box, you will get a scroll down of all the categories. Start typing the category and select the right one.

Remember that you should never select Business, Consumers, and Employees as highlighted above. That is one of our 3 term categories that is only for organizational purposes.
When typing categories, you will likely see several versions of the same category with different indentation. Select any of them. They are all the same.

Then start typing the appropriate tags in the tagging field. If the tag already exists, select the correct one from the scroll down. If not, create the new tag and hit enter.

While these instructions make it seem like you should always categorize first and tag second. That is not really important. Do what works for you.
Be aware that many of our best interns and staff have found tagging first and categorizing second to be very effective for fast and high quality work.

Please see Category Policies for more information on Categorization and Tagging.
http://wiki.votesmart.org/CategoryPolicies

Expectations:

Once you get used to the process, each speech should take you about 60 seconds to categorize. If you are working on only historical categorization, you should get about 400-500 speeches categorized and tagged each day. Initially, you will have to read the speeches more carefully in order to get the hang of categorizing and tagging. We expect you to start out slower (probably 100 per day or 1 every 4-5 minutes) and then speed up as you get used to the process.

Tracking:

Your supervisor will be provided with your user activity records in order to track your progress. This way your supervisor will be able to evaluate your work and give you better feedback. You will receive emails from your supervisor with the number of speeches you complete each day as well as any feedback on your work. At the end of the day on Fridays you will send in a weekly report to your supervisor with the number of speeches and anything else you completed that week.

Other Tools

We have identical categorization tools for PCT data, and Biographical data. During training you will likely spend 2-3 days working with Speeches. That data is some of the easiest to work with, due to the amount of information immediately at hand, but it is also most cat and tag intensive in our database. Later in your training you will likely spend 1 day on each of the other data sections.

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