I'm working on a project right now that requires a lot of data about higher education institutions to even get started. I need the following information about colleges in the US: State, Name of College, List of Departments, and List of Department Designators (CPS for Computer Science, BIO for Biology).<p>How would you go about farming this data? I've thought about submitting specific requests to Amazon Mechanical Turk, but I wasn't sure if there were any other resources out there that might be useful.
I don't think it's listed in one place - I would get a list of school from Wikipedia or the Dept. of Education (they must have a list somewhere), and put it out as a MT task. If you do this, do a search for how to properly use the service, as there seems to be a certain etiquette and way to interact with the Turkers to get best results. One example of the kind of post I mean is <a href="http://iamelgringo.blogspot.com/2008/09/mechanical-turk-now-with-25-percent.html" rel="nofollow">http://iamelgringo.blogspot.com/2008/09/mechanical-turk-now-...</a>, but I know there have been a few others posted here.<p>If you don't want to Turk it, you could put it out on craigslist or Kijiji as a freelance contract, but I suspect this would be more trouble than any savings you'd get over MT.