Are there any part-time data collection and labeling communities that focus on simple annotations for research datasets?

Yes — there are a few part-time / task-based data collection and labeling communities that sometimes include simple annotation work for research datasets. The best options depend on whether you want academic research tasks, crowdwork, or community science.

Common places to look

1) Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)

• Lots of small labeling tasks: image tagging, text classification, transcription, survey-style annotations.
• Many tasks are posted by universities or research labs.
• Good if you want flexible, part-time microtasks.

2) Prolific

• Focuses more on research participation, but some studies involve annotation-like tasks.
• Usually higher-quality academic work than general crowd platforms.
• Good for simple, short research dataset tasks.

3) Clickworker / Appen / TELUS International AI

• These platforms often have data labeling and evaluation tasks.
• Work can include simple annotations, content categorization, or image/text labeling.
• Availability depends on country and project openings.

4) Zooniverse

• A citizen-science/community science platform with many simple labeling tasks:
  • classifying galaxies
  • tagging wildlife
  • transcribing historical documents
• More “research contribution” than paid work, but often very accessible.

5) Local university research labs

• Some universities recruit part-time annotators for:
  • speech labeling
  • image/video tagging
  • NLP dataset annotation
• These may be posted on:
  • department job boards
  • university hiring pages
  • research assistant listings
  • LinkedIn

6) Label Studio / open-source research communities

• Not a job marketplace, but sometimes open research projects recruit volunteers or short-term annotators.
• Useful if you want to contribute to open datasets.

If you want simple annotations specifically

Look for keywords like:

• classification
• bounding box
• transcription
• sentiment labeling
• entity tagging
• image verification
• content moderation
• short survey tasks

Best starting points

If you want paid part-time work:

1. MTurk
2. Prolific
3. Clickworker/Appen/TELUS

If you want easy research-community annotation:

1. Zooniverse
2. University research postings

If you want, I can also give you:

• a list of legit platforms by country
• places to find these jobs
• or how to avoid scam data-labeling offers.