[This pre­sen­ta­tion was post­ed in four pieces. Section mark­ers appear at the breaks as there were some­times brief gaps between them.]

Fox Harrell: Firstly, thank you Kenny and the orga­niz­ers for invit­ing me and hav­ing me here. And one of things I’ll talk about is that social activism and using tech­nol­o­gy for empow­er­ment, it’s part­ly out­reach and the activism with­in the world, but also becom­ing learn­ers, doers, cre­ators, builders of our own tech­nolo­gies. And also under­stand­ing the ways that the tech­nolo­gies them­selves build oppres­sive struc­tures. And so we’ll see a bit of that.

So here’s what I do. I direct the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab at MIT. And we research and devel­op arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and cog­ni­tive science-based com­put­ing sys­tems for cre­ative expres­sion, cul­tur­al analy­sis and social change.

So today’s talk has two dif­fer­ent parts to it. So I’ll talk about com­pu­ta­tion­al iden­ti­ty tech­nolo­gies (That’s self imagination—how we imag­ine our­selves through social net­works, online vir­tu­al worlds, through games.), and the project I’m run­ning, which is National Science Foundation sup­port­ed, called the Advanced Identity Representation Project, or the AIR Project. And then an exam­ple ICE Lab project for social change that worked with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia.

So this is my moti­va­tion, to start off with. In the real world we can cre­ative­ly rep­re­sent our­selves in dynam­ic ways. So, we can vary our ges­ture, our dis­course, our pos­ture, our fash­ion, life sto­ries, the way we tell our sto­ries. And all of this is with an astound­ing sen­si­tiv­i­ty to social context.

Now, com­put­er tech­nolo­gies like com­put­er games, social net­work­ing, and vir­tu­al worlds are much more prim­i­tive than what we do in the real world. And so Kenny intro­duced me as the way of the future. Actually I think the ways that we’ve learned to nego­ti­ate the world—so the black expe­ri­ence, the ways we’ve had to adapt tragedies for sur­vival, all of that I think is much more advanced than what we have here in these tech­nolo­gies. Because these tech­nolo­gies require us to rep­re­sent our­selves through com­pu­ta­tion­al data struc­tures, through algo­rithms. So they have much less nuance than we have in the real world. 

So it rais­es a few ques­tions for us. So that’s, how can we serve the human need for self-expression and iden­ti­ty con­struc­tion using the com­put­er? How can we rep­re­sent our­selves in dynam­ic ways or even think about our pow­er rela­tion­ships with oth­er peo­ple in the world, social issues, and oppression?

Let me give you an exam­ple of what the prob­lem is. Do peo­ple know these games already? This is World of Warcraft here on the left, and this is Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on the right. So, in Elder Scrolls IV, let’s con­sid­er how it might stig­ma­tize users. So, the osten­si­bly ​“African” char­ac­ters are called the Redguard are described in the essen­tial­ist stereo­type of a black ath­lete. So you read the man­u­al or the instruc­tions, they’re the most nat­u­ral­ly tal­ent­ed war­riors in Tamriel. The Redguards are also phys­i­cal­ly blessed with hardy con­sti­tu­tions, quick­ness of foot. So what hap­pens in game­play terms is it gives you bonus­es even­tu­al­ly to your run­ning and jump­ing abil­i­ty. [audi­ence laugth­er]

We can go a bit fur­ther, so let’s look under the hood of the game. What this is is a chart of all the default sta­tis­tics for a char­ac­ter. You’ll notice things that are a bit inter­est­ing here. Like if you’re an orc and you hap­pen to be female— One thing I should say is that most of these games say racial divi­sions for fic­ti­tious races like if you’re an orc or a troll or an elf. This one actu­al­ly has Norwegian peo­ples, the Redguard which are black peo­ple, the Bretons which are the French. So it saves those kind of racial changes that are nor­mal­ly fan­tas­tic races and applies them to what are osten­si­bly real races. 

So if you hap­pen to be a female orc you’ll see here by default you’re ten points more intel­li­gent than your male coun­ter­part. If you’re a human Breton, which is the French group that I men­tioned, you’re twen­ty points more intel­li­gent by default than your Norwegian or black coun­ter­parts. So the choice of race and gen­der with­in this game results in ability-based stereotypes.

I was inter­viewed for a site, Boing Boing, which is a blog, and crit­i­cized a num­ber of dif­fer­ent games for the lim­it­ed abil­i­ties to rep­re­sent our­selves, and an inter­est­ing thing hap­pened, which was that that was reblogged again by a gam­ing site. The orig­i­nal Boing Boing arti­cle was called some­thing like ​“Professor Fox Harrell and His Chimerical Avatar” [​“Chimerical Avatars and Other Identity Experiments from Prof. Fox Harrell”], how these avatars that change based on what you do, your emo­tions, and the way that you inter­act with­in the world.

When it was reblogged on this site called Kotaku, they changed the title to ​“Making Avatars That Aren’t White Dudes is Hard.” They also changed the goal of what I was try­ing to accom­plish, since they said, ​“Fox Harrell wants to cre­ate avatars that look, well, like he does.” Maybe they meant maybe my social cat­e­go­ry, not just a kind of pure nar­cis­sism. Anyway, it spawned a series of incen­di­ary com­ments about it. 

So I pub­lished anoth­er arti­cle through that same blog and sug­gest­ed ten dif­fer­ent ways that we can improve our avatar representation. 

And maybe it had an impact, because Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim—some peo­ple might know that—this is the new default Redguard char­ac­ter. If you play the game, this is what the char­ac­ter looks like now. And the inter­est­ing thing, though, is that my critique—the arti­cle had a big pic­ture of my face along with an avatar. So it was a bit inter­est­ing. Maybe they respond­ed to the arti­cle. But the thing is, regard­less of how the char­ac­ter looks it still is going to be twen­ty points less intel­li­gent than your French counterpart. 

…num­ber of ways that they actu­al­ly could have improved it. Say, tie a life sto­ry into the way that you con­struct your char­ac­ters or expe­ri­ence would be a very sim­ple kind change. 

But we can go a lot deep­er than just look­ing at default stats. Let’s look at the under­ly­ing iden­ti­ty ele­ments that are bro­ken down into data struc­tures. This is from a game called Neverwinter Nights. And if you look under the hood, actu­al­ly, you have data struc­tures for race, even blood col­or by race—something almost like the one-drop rule. And so chang­ing race in this game actu­al­ly does­n’t change the appear­ance of your char­ac­ter. But many items have racially-based bonuses. 

Gender is inter­est­ing if you look under­neath the hood. Because when you play you just see the char­ac­ter, but in the data struc­ture there are actu­al­ly five dif­fer­ent gen­ders. You might think that it’s some­what more expan­sive than say a bina­ry gen­der rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Anyway, if you hap­pen to be male, both, oth­er, or none—which are four of the gen­der representations—you have a default male body type. So in fact despite these five dif­fer­ent [gen­der] types under the hood, you have just two bina­ry gen­ders with­in it.

So the point of all this is that these ele­ments are built into the very data struc­ture of the games. So just tak­ing up a char­ac­ter in a vir­tu­al world and say­ing, ​“I’m going to look like some­body dif­fer­ent than I am,” it does­n’t do that much, actu­al­ly, in order to think about our­selves through a dif­fer­ent lens or think about our­selves as a new iden­ti­ty or to empow­er our­selves. In fact, a cer­tain type of oppres­sion or dis­crim­i­na­tion is built into the under­ly­ing struc­ture of the code. So it means it behooves us to build new tech­nolo­gies or think about becom­ing cre­ators or does or learn­ers and builders of technology.

In social net­work­ing there are prob­lems, too. So for exam­ple this is an old Facebook page, but opt­ing in or opt­ing out to an iden­ti­ty is just say, join­ing a group. And so you see in Facebook, if you want to be [some­what?] Native American, opt into the Native American group, with its stereo­typ­i­cal so-called noble sav­age metaphors here. It’s quite a sim­plis­tic mod­el of group membership.

I won’t go through all of these, but there are a num­ber dif­fer­ent prob­lems that we have, whether it’s com­put­er games, social net­work­ing, vir­tu­al worlds, any of our online accounts, any of these dig­i­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tions. And it’s the fact that our iden­ti­ties are reduced to sta­tis­tics. Social cat­e­gories are reduced to just graph­i­cal mod­els and skins, so just noth­ing but appear­ance. Character change isn’t dri­ven by any­thing like emo­tion or actu­al­ly meet­ing peo­ple or what you do, but rather com­bat, spa­tial explo­ration, and acquir­ing objects.

In social net­work­ing, we have a sim­plis­tic mod­el that join­ing a com­mu­ni­ty is just click a but­ton and you’re a mem­ber of the com­mu­ni­ty. You don’t actu­al­ly have to live, work, breathe with the community.

Virtual worlds, we have— So what about states like tran­si­tion­ing or becom­ing? I was actu­al­ly on a pan­el once with a trans­gen­der dig­i­tal media artist. That was some­one who was actu­al­ly in a state of tran­si­tion. I said what about becom­ing? Well that’s some­thing we all deal with as you become an expert, for exam­ple, from being a novice. We’re always in states of tran­si­tion, but usu­al­ly you’re always just some­thing fixed in dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy. Limited cul­tur­al diver­si­ty. So there are a lot of lim­i­ta­tions that we have that in cur­rent technologies. 

But you might ask what’s even the big prob­lem just because well, it’s just a game, right? It’s just a vir­tu­al world. Well, there’s research—some of my own empir­i­cal research, Jerry Bailenson at Stanford is anoth­er person—that shows that changes to the vir­tu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tions impact issues like inter­per­son­al con­fi­dence, body image, stu­dents’ per­cep­tion of them­selves as learn­ers and does. So our real-world inter­ac­tion with peo­ple can be changed sig­nif­i­cant­ly by the way we inter­act through our vir­tu­al iden­ti­ties. And if you even have an account for your cell phone, you have a vir­tu­al iden­ti­ty in some kind of way. It’s not just these pyrotech­nic exam­ples in the video games I mention. 

So, address­ing these prob­lems I think will make more diverse user groups, pro­vide bet­ter cus­tomiz­abil­i­ty, make for more salient and pow­er­ful expe­ri­ences, invent new forms of art, enter­tain­ment, and iden­ti­ty. So in short, we can do a lot bet­ter than the cur­rent state. 

So you can say that we’ve at least been try­ing to take some mod­est steps towards doing so in the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab. And so with the sup­port of the National Science Foundation I ini­ti­at­ed a five-year project that’s called the Advanced Identity Representation Project. That’s devel­op­ing a toolk­it that works across platforms—social net­work­ing, avatars, pro­files, characters—that enables rich self-expression; that can change dynam­i­cal­ly; address issues like social stig­ma, bias, prej­u­dice; and is based on cog­ni­tive sci­ence mod­els of how we cat­e­go­rize in the world.

So instead of just the naïve intu­ition of a game design­er who might not know any­thing about the expe­ri­ence of diverse groups of peo­ple, we’re look­ing at how we actu­al­ly cog­ni­tive­ly cat­e­go­rize in the world. And it’s much dif­fer­ent than peo­ple assume. We don’t actu­al­ly just have cat­e­gories [where] we just try to force peo­ple into small box­es. What peo­ple tend to do is to have a pro­to­type, mod­els of fam­i­ly resem­blances. It’s much more flex­i­ble than the way that peo­ple imag­ine in most of these infrastructures.

And we can learn a lot, even going back to 1903 from say WEB Du Bois and double-consciousness. So as I men­tioned, before the kind of rich ways that we nav­i­gate the world give us a lot of pow­er and insight in how we can devel­op more pow­er­ful tech­nolo­gies. So the dual aware­ness of peo­ple from mar­gin­al­ized groups of their self-perception and social stig­ma that tends to be attrib­uted to the group.

Everyday self-presentation. So the fact that we adapt to per­form iden­ti­ties like ges­tures and dis­course, reg­is­ter for dif­fer­ent social situations.

And even recent­ly in ​’99, iden­ti­ty torque. That’s the psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly painful expe­ri­ence of a per­son­’s self-conception dif­fer­ing from broad­er stig­ma­tiz­ing per­cep­tions rein­forced by clas­si­fi­ca­tion infrastructures.

So I mean it’s just essen­tial­ly the same thing that Du Bois said back in the day, but just the fact that these infra­struc­ture we have, like the game for con­struct­ing our char­ac­ters, or online accounts, actu­al­ly result in psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly painful expe­ri­ences where you have some dis­junc­tion between who you are in the real world and then the way that you have to rep­re­sent your­self through those technologies. 

Audience 1: Do iden­ti­ty torque again. Just explain a lit­tle more.

Harrell: Sure. So, it’s essen­tial­ly what Du Bois was talk­ing about, but the idea of torque is the idea of twist­ing. It’s a twist­ing of our biogra­phies, of our life sto­ries, against the tech­nolo­gies that we have to engage. So when you have to go and use— It’s that sense I have say cre­at­ing the char­ac­ter in Skyrim, and oh, it looks like me now, but I have to be a lit­tle bit less intel­li­gent if I want to look like me. So maybe I should look like the French char­ac­ter or Roman char­ac­ter. So my biog­ra­phy being twist­ed up against that infrastructure. 

And the same thing when you cre­ate an online pro­file on Facebook and you have to kow­tow to com­mer­cial inter­ests, for exam­ple. Or you have to rep­re­sent your­self in a group just by opt­ing into the group. So it’s that sense that you have much rich­er self and sto­ry, and when you go to use these tech­nolo­gies then there’s a kind of psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly painful expe­ri­ence that’s detri­men­tal to your health and happiness.

So, the sort of things that our toolk­it can allow are say chang­ing user’s self-representation for dif­fer­ent social groups. Basic things that peo­ple do—code-switching. So you have dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences. Again, the things that we do in the real world can give us a lot of insights for new technologies.

For bet­ter or for worse, right? So, stereo­typ­ing or pass­ing. Are peo­ple pass­ing on Facebook? That does­n’t just mean racial pass­ing, but say what if we’re— I think Kenny and I were talk­ing just ear­li­er about a move­ment towards say punk rock music or skate­board­ing with­in the black com­mu­ni­ty. What if peo­ple just want to seem a bit more like they’re in that scene than they actu­al­ly are? There’s a kind of pass­ing there. So can we iden­ti­fy this kind of pass­ing that we have with­in social networking? 

What about swap­ping between mul­ti­ple iden­ti­ties the way that we use dif­fer­ent enti­ties in dif­fer­ent situations? 

What about aspi­ra­tional iden­ti­ties? Not just a fic­ti­tious iden­ti­ty or some­thing neg­a­tive like pass­ing, but what about what you see your­self as in the future? We mod­el our aspi­ra­tional identities.

And one of the things that I’ve noticed is that in social net­work­ing or com­put­er games, at some lev­el there’s some lev­el of abstrac­tion or some sim­i­lar­i­ty between the way we rep­re­sent our­selves in these dif­fer­ent tech­nolo­gies. And so what I did here was just draw a graph that shows a Facebook pro­file and a char­ac­ter in a game called Dragon Age. And so in Facebook you have your pro­file, you have these links like ​“friends with” and your groups of friends. You have dif­fer­ent pages, dif­fer­ent things that you like there. And in Dragon Age you have dif­fer­ent skills and class­es like you might be a rogue, or you might use a dag­ger. So there’s some lev­el at which you can abstract and start to com­pare these iden­ti­ties to process them in the same way. You can start to say is this iden­ti­ty like anoth­er iden­ti­ty? And so that’s where you can start to use com­put­ing to think about these kind of issues, like Du Bois and oth­ers have thought about.

…go much into all of the detail, but I’ll tell you about some of the kind of things our sys­tem allows. So let’s say dis­cov­er­ing social cat­e­gories. You might look at every­body in your social net­work and then find who are the peo­ple that tend to like the same thing? The peo­ple that like cer­tain films, what are the kind of movies that they tend to like also. Or what are the kind of activ­i­ties, places that they go. And so you can find social cat­e­gories that are built into the net­work, that peo­ple haven’t explic­it­ly gone in there and labeled. 

What about find­ing peo­ple that are like you, not just by going in and say­ing ​“I want to find every­one who’s a woman who lives in Cambridge,” but to say what about the things that you do or the things that maybe you like?

You can pre­dict belong­ing in cat­e­gories and say, ​“based on what I know about these oth­er social cat­e­gories, I think that this per­son would fit into this oth­er cat­e­go­ry.” And some of these aren’t just util­i­tar­i­an tools. They’re also just tools to think with, to think about issues. Like how can you think about belong­ing from a com­pu­ta­tion­al per­spec­tive? Because most com­put­er sci­en­tists don’t deal with issues like belong­ing as a mem­ber of a group.

Seeing iden­ti­ties in terms of one anoth­er. So that’s again this kind of pass­ing, or say even pos­ing. Is a per­son try­ing to be a mem­ber of my group? And so you could see their iden­ti­ty through the lens of a group that you find your­self in.

I’ll show you just a lit­tle bit of what this looks like. I’ll scroll through it. You can do things, say see the sys­tem with a few dif­fer­ent games like say a game, StarCraft, Civilization here, and then from there say ​“what do oth­er peo­ple in this per­son­’s social net­work who like these games also tend to like?” And so this is an MIT stu­den­t’s social net­work. And for his net­work for some rea­son, these gamers also tend to like some series of these clas­si­cal music com­posers. That’s some­thing that you would­n’t have known that ahead of time, before using the system.

You can go in and rela­bel the cat­e­gories, too. This is a cat­e­go­ry called ​“hip­sters,” and maybe [inaudi­ble] inde­pen­dent films or oth­er sort of things. Then you find things in oth­er cat­e­gories that the per­son might just tend to like. Or things in peo­ple’s par­tic­u­lar local com­mu­ni­ty, even. So, sports fan.

So the inter­est­ing thing, too, is it’s not just try­ing to cat­e­go­rize all sports fans, it’s very local for that per­son­’s net­work. So when you talked about punk rock music before, one per­son­’s punk rock music might be pop punk rock, or Green Day, or some kind of band. Someone else might be under­ground. Someone else might be strict­ly black punk rock. It could be inter­na­tion­al. So it’s very par­tic­u­lar for your local com­mu­ni­ty. So what the sys­tem can do is find okay, who like sports in his own net­work and then what oth­er things they like. They tend to like the Cold Stone Creamery. But also they tend to like some spe­cif­ic restau­rant that just hap­pens to be in Watsonville, California. So it’s not just any­thing, it’s some­thing very par­tic­u­lar to their own network.

And so now we can go back to those things things I talked about before, iden­ti­ty torque, double-consciousness, and pass­ing, things we know about from the real world, and say— We actu­al­ly imple­ment­ed those in a com­pu­ta­tion­al way. So when I talk about pass­ing, we could say— The mech­a­nism you could use to think about pass­ing on a com­put­ers is alter­ing some of your rep­re­sen­ta­tion to more close­ly resem­ble a mem­ber of anoth­er cat­e­go­ry. So you have all of these kind of char­ac­ter­is­tics cod­ed in the data struc­ture, and to think about it in ways in social net­work­ing to anony­mous­ly explore iden­ti­ties that are dif­fer­ent than your own, whether for good or for ill. So it’s just a way we can say that these phe­nom­e­na exist but in tech­ni­cal terms that are also in dia­logue with what we do in every­day life. The same with double-consciousness.

Multiple visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tions. We built sys­tems, for exam­ple a game where depend­ing on what you do—if you’re walk­ing through the sub­urbs in your char­ac­ter, then if you act aggres­sive­ly or if you pray or if you punch some­one, the char­ac­ter changes in a total­ly dif­fer­ent way. If you use your cell phone or take out your wal­let, you start to become more commerce-oriented, like a tycoon. Like a Monopoly man, you have stock charts burst­ing out of your head, or mon­ey bags start to appear. So your char­ac­ter’s just con­stant­ly chang­ing. It’s not just get­ting new weapons, you’re chang­ing in more poet­ic ways. 

What I want to do now is just segue to anoth­er project which is a quite dif­fer­ent but relat­ed to iden­ti­ty dis­cus­sion, because it helps us to tell sto­ries from the point of view of dif­fer­ent enti­ties. And this project is called the Living Liberia Fabric. We’ve imple­ment­ed a num­ber of dif­fer­ent projects. This one was ini­ti­at­ed [by] a col­league in inter­na­tion­al affairs, but it’s quite time­ly now, espe­cial­ly since Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was just award­ed the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Many of you might know that the West African nation of Liberia was nev­er for­mal­ly col­o­nized. It was polit­i­cal­ly estab­lished in 1847 by free­born African Americans, Africans freed from cap­tured slave ships, all of whom were set­tled in an area that would become Liberia by the American Colonization Society. So this was a col­lu­sion of inter­ests. It was slave own­ers, the US gov­ern­ment… So I’m not say­ing that it’s a kind of benev­o­lent expe­ri­ence. In fact, the con­flict between the local pop­u­la­tions with a series of a prof­i­teers who who aid­ed them ini­ti­at­ed civ­il wars from 1989 until 2003. About 250,000 peo­ple were killed. That’s one third of the pop­u­la­tion that was displaced.

And so one of the things that Ellen Johnson Sirleaf did was to appoint a Truth and Reconciliation Commission mod­eled on the more famous one in Post-Apartheid South Africa. And one of the things that the TRC said is that memo­ri­al­iza­tion is a nec­es­sary part of fur­ther­ing the peace process. And so that’s—

And so I had my stu­dents meet with the Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner from Liberia, peace muse­um experts, dias­po­ra Liberians who were in Georgia, also sur­vivors of civ­il war—a gen­tle­men whose own son was abduct­ed to become a child sol­dier, tragically—and went around and col­lect­ed a num­ber of sto­ries and pub­lished books about this. So we real­ly engaged with the com­mu­ni­ty, spent a long time just to try to under­stand that con­flict. So see­ing our­selves as stake­hold­ers, too. Not like we’re going to use tech­nol­o­gy for out­reach but say­ing how do we relate to this through our own his­to­ries, our own biographies.

And so what the sys­tem does is it uses users’ actions to reveal mul­ti­me­dia con­tent, video, pho­tographs, texts, and an AI sys­tem I wrote called GRIOT that simul­ta­ne­ous­ly coor­di­nates themes, nar­ra­tive struc­ture, and media assets, by find­ing analo­gies between them.

And so what we did was find a series of infor­ma­tion through our expe­ri­ences talk­ing to peo­ple, we encod­ed it here at three dif­fer­ent levels—a visu­al lev­el, at the lev­el of the kind of frame that it inter­acts with, and then stake­hold­ers groups, dif­fer­ent kinds of themes, activists themes. And so we entered all this infor­ma­tion in a form that could be manip­u­lat­ed com­pu­ta­tion­al­ly. You’ll have to read this. It’s fas­ci­nat­ing, the for­mat that our sys­tem could use. And then behind that, it struc­tures a nar­ra­tive dif­fer­ent­ly each time you inter­act with it.

So what I’ll do is I’ll show you just a lit­tle bit of the way that the sys­tem works. And so the text is a bit a bit hard to read on the pro­jec­tor. Here it says ​“a silent moment for loss.” So what you do, before I start it, is you have a series of dif­fer­ent fig­ures here. When you start it, you just hear a bit of ocean sound. If you click on one of the fig­ures, what that does is pick a stake­hold­er group, like woman or child. But that stake­hold­er group could mean woman sur­vivor, it could be woman com­bat­ant. So you’re not choos­ing every­thing, you’re choos­ing one aspect of it.

That will pick a series of clips that will appear with­in the fab­ric. And then from those clips, you can click on just one of them. Then the next clip will be sim­i­lar to the one you just picked. So if you click on some­thing about a woman that deals with activism, then the one that comes after that will deal with activism. Then the next one might be a child that deals with activism. So it’s a way that we’re using AI not just to gen­er­ate a sto­ry but rather to impro­vi­sa­tion­al­ly make sure that there’s the­mat­ic links between it. So I’ll just play a lit­tle bit of it so you can see what what it looks like.

[The demon­stra­tion is view­able in the orig­i­nal video from ~2:30–5:25. There is also a demon­stra­tion clip on YouTube, show­ing a dif­fer­ent instance of the project.]

So here you see all the oth­er relat­ed stake­hold­er groups, and also kind of lost peo­ple that might be relat­ed to that group.

I should also say it’s a bit arti­fi­cial show­ing it here. It says some­thing like this is what the tech­nol­o­gy can do. Because the idea of the sys­tem was to say not what can we do for Liberia but to say how can we root com­pu­ta­tion with­in the cul­ture of Liberia. So that’s when you can ground com­put­ing prac­tices with­in diverse cul­tur­al prac­tices. And so it’s a diverse per­spec­tive. We’re not just say­ing how can we go there and cul­tur­al­ly plun­der for the sake of tech­nol­o­gy, and so it’s a big dif­fer­ence here.

And these videos were col­lect­ed by a col­league actu­al­ly in Liberia, dri­ving around in a truck from doc­u­men­tary film, from archival footage. So there’s a close per­son­al con­nec­tion to a lot footage, too.

So I’ll wrap up here before mov­ing on to Malia. And so I’ll just say that the con­clu­sion is just that com­put­ing can be used for sub­jec­tive expres­sion and social change. It’s not just a kind of objec­tive medi­um. And so in the kind of work we do, we think about imag­i­na­tion. Imagination as a kind of art­ful thought, inter­ac­tive nar­ra­tive, poet­ry, gam­ing, as a space for self-expression and self-imagination. Computational iden­ti­ty sys­tems, imag­i­na­tion as cat­e­go­riza­tion, and more robust, more pow­er­ful forms of cat­e­go­riza­tion that learns from life expe­ri­ence, learns from the expe­ri­ence of the mar­gin­al­ized or the sur­vivors, and the dig­ni­ty of peo­ple who strug­gle for social change. And our projects are just a few mod­est steps towards those ends. Thank you.