Text Thresher improves the social science practice of content analysis, making it vastly more transparent and scalable to hundreds of thousands of documents. Text Thresher is a web-interface operating in citizen science and crowd working environments like CrowdCrafting. The interface allows researchers to clearly specify hand-labeling and text classification tasks in a user-friendly workflow that maximizes crowd worker accuracy and efficiency. As citizen scientists or crowd workers label and extract data from thousands of documents using Text Thresher, they simultaneously generate training sets enabling machine learning algorithms to augment or replace researchers' and crowd workers' efforts. Output is ready for a range of computational text analysis techniques and viewable as labels layered over original document text. Text Thresher is free and open source and will be ready for use by the broader research community in the late 2017.
