Voices from Online Labour: Inequalities in digital earning activities across countries – VOLI

Digital labour platforms use data and algorithms to match clients with workers, construed as independent contractors, for one-off ‘gigs’ without any long-term commitment. Building on scattered, but growing evidence that gender, race and other gaps persist in these settings, the proposed project addresses unresolved questions both in the digital inequalities literature and in the digital labour literature. To do so, VOLI innovatively combines hypotheses and methods from sociology and large-scale corpus linguistics, and relies on speech technology and artificial intelligence to tackle the emergent economic and societal risks that coalesce around the nexus between online platform labour and social inequalities. At the same time, the methods that will be developed within this highly interdisciplinary project advance the linguistic study of the factors driving speech variation, augmenting language corpora with rich sets of metadata from sociological surveys, while also building and testing new and improved tools for automated transcription.