On “Critical Approaches to Black Media Culture” Conference.

Reflections on my time in New Orleans, French Quarter. February 2024.

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For the past year or so I’ve been participating in the Archiving The Black Web (AtBW) project. The growth of social media presents a unique opportunity to archivists and memory workers interested in documenting the contemporary black experience. As part of this mission, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 members of the Black Queer Twitter community to document self presentation and community building efforts online. The other scholars of the AtBW and I submitted our independent projects as part of a panel to the “Critical Approaches to Black Media Culture” conference hosted by Tulane University. Due to the phenomenal efforts of Meredith Clark and the AtBW team, we were accepted to present and discuss our work in NEW ORLEANS.

I was so excited because: 1) this was a chance to explore a different communities/venues than your typical HCI/CSCW conference that centered black culture and media; 2) I had always wanted to visit New Orleans!

Quickly: New Orleans was a BLAST!!

A couple months in Ithaca had me ready for Mardi Gras and neighborhood block parties, lots of street photography, delicious food, cutting UP!! with funny and warm southern black people, learning more about voodoo/hoodoo religion and local legends like Marie Leveau, and so much more!I was living my best life liiiiike:

I listened to an older local gentleman talk about his lost lady love and how he preserved a space in a mausoleum for them to lie together for eternity once he died. I listened to and comforted a crying a lady sob bitterly over broken social ties and being abandoned on Mardi Gras. I witnessed so much humanity in so little time.

The people really made New Orleans a magical experience.

(picture depicts blackened redfish): and the FOOD, chile, let me not forget the food. I never knew fish could do what it did. Magical.

The people that I met at the conference and shared my work with really made for a powerful experience.

Coming into this experience, working on my project came with a lot of growing pains and I grew hyper aware of how othered my research project felt in predominantly white institutions where certain experiences are simply not centered.

So I was so nervous! Nervous about doing justice to my participants and the data they’ve entrusted me with. Nervous about public speaking. Nervous I wouldn’t finish my presentation notes 20 minutes before my talk.

But presenting at the “Critical Approaches to Black Media Culture conference” was different from my other conference experiences for very important reasons.

I remember standing outside of my presentation room urging myself to enter and I met the kindest black lady who gave me a pep talk and reminded me that this conference was here for people like me and that they were here cheering me on.

Grounded by her words I entered the room and marched to the front to set up my presentation. This same lady later decided to join and listened to my panel talk. That was way more than what I could have expected, it was so kind of her!

The 3rd presenter was not able to attend so it was me and Sinnamon Love on a panel on Black Interiority.

It was wonderful.

Here, amongst other black scholars, Science and research felt truly joyous and fruitful. People laughed at my jokes. People engaged with it critically but also joyfully. They could see the humor in the data and results due to that shared cultural humor and experiences. I found the session so helpful because there was no longer this wall between me and my audience. People had deeper questions about my research.

One of my favorite talks: “Digital SPILL: Black Data and Meaning Making in New Social Media”

I’ve workshopped the early stages paper at Cornell but I could tell that’s not where the work belonged. Where people could engage with it critically but also joyfully. Who could see the humor in the data and results due to that shared cultural humor and experiences. Here, I felt lighter and I realized how long I’ve carried the burden of proof. What I mean by that is – Even though persuasion is part of the game of science, It was super nice to feel that I didn’t have to do an extra layer of translational work because the research was on black people and culture. Here, I was encouraged to be more bold and more authentic in my future work. Here, black people were centered as knowledge producers. Here, I felt like my work belonged and that it had found a home.

I haven’t recovered from the fact we listened to “Changes” by Tupac Shakur as part of critical research 🖤 Home is where the music is ~

I left New Orleans with my belly full of beignet and my heart full of love and pride for the work I do.

Being here also made me confront and challenge my own bias for what is considered knowledge, who creates knowledge, and who legitimizes knowledge.

After I returned to Ithaca I got back to work figuring out my next steps

I later spoke to a colleague at CAT Lab about next steps for the paper. The conversation kinda went like this:

Me: “NOLA was great! … time to send the paper to a conference.”

Her: “Didn’t you just present it at one?”

Me: “I mean like HCI or CSCW or AOIR”

Her: “But you already done the things . You would have the same experiences at those conferences”

At that moment, I was confused. I then realized what I was subconsciously angling at – legitimacy. My work could only be legitimate if it entered the annals of well recognized and historic conferences like CHI and CSCW. Spaces that held a lot of power. Because surely, a conference that was for black people, centered black people, could not be legitimate in the same way even though the methods and rigor was all the same, no?

Upon reflection, I realized that being in this space brought to light my own internalized anti-blackness within academic spaces that managed to remain hidden from even myself. I had thought that this was a part of myself that I had long since interrogated and proven wrong.

It makes sense why it had for so long. I had only pivoted into more critical work last year. I had gone from a pure focus on HCI/UX to more critical work, i.e I had to deal with real people, real populations, real differences when it came to my work. Research and data became messier in a way that they were not for me before.

I’m still grappling with the increasing ‘realness’ of my work as I navigate power hierarchies in these institutions of knowledge. I’m learning everyday and more than anything I’m thankful for the communities and support I find along the way way as I learn more about myself and the world around me.

I decided that I wouldn’t submit to another conference because my colleague, as she often has the tendency to be, is right. I considered what was best not just for me (or rather my ego) but what was best for the work itself. It had found its home in New Orleans.

Geeked,

J

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We really got to find the places that accept us and our work so I’m also gonna be noting of Qualitative Friendly conferences as I come upon them.

https://icqi.org/home/submission/

Community While In Academia = PRICELESS

What is community in the ivory tower, really? and the restorative power of female friendship on this PhD journey

This article was partly prompted by a question a junior phd student in my lab asked: how do you make friends in a new town, in a PhD program?

To start – I cherish my female friendships. They are so emotionally intimate, SO MUCH FUN, and are often a safe space for us to kick back and relax or to mutually blow off steam together with a venting session.

While I had these sort of connections in my personal life through a 15 person co-op I joined my first year, I had a hard time imagining finding a substantive community in academia as a PhD.

Yes I have colleagues – but my colleagues often played the role of colleague more than (close or even just good) friends, and while people may say that a PhD is different than say undergrad or a masters and that there is no “competition” you’ve all made it … I find that you are in competition in small or big way such as – through gleaning some of the precious time of shared advisors, whose paper gets accepted to conference in a lab, being perceived as serious enough or more serious than others about your research, applying to the same internship positions… it just feels different sometimes.

People can not always play more than one role in your life and that’s okay! You can’t just expect them to do both and for them to play both well. I think it’s also honest to know that you yourself can’t play both roles for other people.

But for me, I know that I needed and I value the reliable emotional support and intimacy that comes with friendship with people who understood the journey. It’s life affirming and is part of what keeps my passion for life – and thus my work – burning.

In my 3rd year I’ve been particularly happy with the community that I’ve cultivated with other PhDs. So I’m going to talk about them a bit:

I first noticed Kowe in a first year class but was I far too shy to speak to her other than the few times we collaborated in class group activities. We later reconnected when we were on the student board for ISGSA and began organizing weekly do-working sessions for other black students in our program. We were frustrated by the isolation and lack of consistent community for black students in IS and have since worked to welcome more students as they enter so they have a place to be held accountable and to feel supported.

I first noticed Drea when I took a Drag makeup workshop. I later reconnected with her when I reached out to the Ithaca Black student GroupMe for participants for my study and she kindly replied.

Meeting Aishat was the funniest one … I first noticed her on a dating app (we matched lol but that’s all). We later reconnected at a mutual friend’s party and she kindly drove me home.

All of them are incredible leaders. Drea is a former BGPSA (Black Graduate Student Association) president. I was VP to Kowe’s co-presidency for ISGSA. Aishat is on the BGPSA board for philanthropy.

Left to right: (1-3) vision board party with Drea and Aishat (4) Kowe Kadoma being hitting bullseye on my heart

Drea Darby, Aishat Sadiq, and Kowe Kadoma are just some of the PHENOMENAL black women who have helped keep me grounded in this unpredictable and often confusingly cruel world. They remind me to re-commit myself to my values for love of community, advocacy for self and community, and resiliency when things are tough. We provide each other a safe space to be ourselves and to dream our wildest dreams and to share in our own time. We check in with each other during difficult times and reaffirm our desire to see each other happy and healthy. We’ve held each other through tears (I’m the friend who will join in a teary group and pause… before cracking a joke to make everyone laugh). We’ve validated and listened to the grief and frustrations of not just the PhD experience but also being in spaces that can be and are antagonistic to ambitious, authentic black women. We often meet each other and set goals for what we want to achieve for a given time. (Sometimes we don’t meet them because we are too busy making eachother laugh). As fellow neurospicies, Double-bodying has saved us many times from getting stuck in overthinking spirals and procrastination spells. We’ve welcomed each others into our homes, fed each other, and have uplifted each other through our hearts again and again.

It’s inspiring being in community and friends with such passionate, compassionate, and hard-working people.

I met them all in very different ways quite unexpectedly. I think my biggest recommendation is put yourself in a position to meet people. It doesn’t mean that you will make friends but you are more likely to meet others who share similar interests and values. Join leadership positions, introduce yourself to other people’s friends, join org GroupMe’s so you can stay abreast of the social scene, talk to people in other departments – PhDs are susceptible to cliques too, organize fun events and have your friends invite other people, be weird, funny, soft you and own that. Get very familiar with feeling rejected and accepting it: You will “fail” at making and keeping friends. People will flake. People will get caught up in their lives and forget about you. People will suddenly stop talking to you and not address it. Maybe you guys will reconnect. or maybe not. That’s all okay – just get up again with a smile. Remaining kind and open after many disappointments is one of the bravest things one can do. It shows that you’ll make for an amazing and emotionally mature friend that anyone would be honored to have in their life 🙂

I’ve been getting to know and welcome more black grad women students and maybe I will highlight them on this blog later as I build my connection with them 🙂

I’ve also joined online communities as well.

Here’s a Discord group for Black Doctoral Students: https://discord.gg/a96QyGJS

Here’s Black Woman in HCI writing group on slack: https://join.slack.com/t/bwwritinggroup/shared_invite/zt-2a2p9hlkl-lmy7VOOwo06FpQPMy6fZ7g

If a link is broken let me know and I can send you an up to date invite.

A Growing Intellectual Community

Left to right: (1) PhD students of the Verizon Lab office (2) Bea responding to me cheering her on at her AOIR presentation (3) Cornell PhD students I met at SREB conference in Tampa, FL (4) CAT Lab and the amazing culture of mutual aid (5) Attending a panel at AOIR (6) Catching up with colleagues from my old lab!

This academic year I’ve done a better up of doing work in the office. This means I’ve spent more time with colleagues.

I may go there in between classes to get work done or rest sipping on coffee from Gates Hall’s own Gimme Coffee.

Colleagues can bring joy in their own way. One of my colleagues got me a plushie decoration for my desk that’s super cute. It’s nice to say hi to folks and sometimes you guys can exchange pieces of helpful information about research, classes, leadership opportunities, internships, and so on.

I’ve also have gotten better about attending the student organized weekly colloquiums where we welcome scholars from other scholars to talk and share their work. I’ve valued seeing the work other people are doing and thinking how I can make my own work relevant. It also allows me to keep updated on the interests of my colleagues and see where their head is at.

One thing I regret from this semester is not properly documenting my experience at AOIR. I think love-blogging may be the way to go for future conferences. What stood out to me is how different it was having attended CHI and CSCW. AOIR was smaller and thus felt more intimate. The format of presentations were different – they didn’t seem to follow the norm that I noticed about CHI/CSCW about here are “X,Y and Methods and now discussion”. AOIR felt closer to the people that they conducted research with and presented findings more of a story rather than as tabulated numbers and graphs. That may have been presented but I didn’t notice those ones so much. Which made me wonder: which venues are more receptive to interpretive and qualitative work?

Maybe I’ll answer that question for a future post.

Geeked,

J

Winter Break Reading List – December & January

Catching up on articles that I’ve seen in passing but didn’t have the time to read.

This is a living document. I will update this document as I see fit.

I’m extrapolating pieces that may be most useful for my research or other interesting topics/points.

Whatever doesn’t get read will be moved to next month’s reading list.

News Articles

What is the Brussels Effect, and what does it mean for global regulation?

• Due to the wealth and size of the EU market, the EU has the power to command the regulations that rule the market. Other countries that want to do business with the EU will adopt their rules
• the EU seems to have global appeal through its values. It’s the middle ground between “American techno-libertarianism” and the “digital authoritarianism of China”
• EU goal seems to be to influence the regulatory framework to create innovations but this might not be enough for AI regulation.

The AI startup erasing call center worker accents: is it fighting bias – or perpetuating it?

• Sanas technology allows for the accents of non-western call center agents, often people from India and the Philippines, to adopt white western accents. This algorithmic “makeup” while in the short term may protect workers from the racist beliefs of frustrated westerners by neutralizing their accents, but in the long term allows, as Aneesh says, ““It allows us to avoid social reality, which is that you are two human beings on the same planet, that you have obligations to each other. It’s pointing to a lonelier future.”

How AI’s critics end up serving the AIs

• The author points out the issue of AI critics moving the goalpost “human-like” so the AI never quite reaches it and when it does dismissing it but that also that the standard of the human mind is an impossible goalpost and comparisons to such are a categorical error.
• I thought it was interesting that the author pointed out that ” Hofstadter makes exactly the same mistake as Marcus by giving single prompts, finding some silly answers, and assuming that this is deeply revealing of the model’s extremely alien psychology. Except slightly different prompts to Hofstadter’s supposedly revealing questions return human-level sensible answers (other critics use the same sort of conflations).” It may then be best to repeat prompting but also alter prompt types to better evaluate outputs.

The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence

• Mary L Gray, Ghost Work, the downplayed human labor driving “AI”- these machines are built and driven by underpaid workers working under precarious social conditions
• The authors themselves are intimately connected to AI work – Adrienne, an Amazon delivery driver and organizer who has encountered the harms of working under surveillance and unrealistic expectations set by automated systems; Milagros is a researcher whoworks with data annotators from Syria, Bulgaria, and Argentina; Timnit Gebru who was retaliated against for speaking up about the harms of AI systems.
• Amazon Mechanical Turk popularized “crowd work”: large amounts of time-consuming work broken down into small tasks that can be done from millions of people across the world for sometimes mere cents.
•  large corporations claiming to be “AI first” are fueled by this army of underpaid gig workers, such as data laborers, content moderators, warehouse workers and delivery drivers.
• the authors argue “while researchers in ethical AI, AI for social good, or human-centered AI have mostly focused on “debiasing” data and fostering transparency and model fairness, here we argue that stopping the exploitation of labor in the AI industry should be at the heart of such initiatives.” –> I can see this trajectory in my own work from working with “Normalize AI”, a startup I had cofounded in 2020, to now as a PhD working with content creators, a type of tech worker.

AI Is a Lot of Work

• Annotations reveal too much of how AI systems work
• “AI is very good at specific tasks, Duhaime said, and that leads work to be broken up and distributed across a system of specialized algorithms and to equally specialized humans.”
• “ChatGPT seems so human because it was trained by an AI that was mimicking humans who were rating an AI that was mimicking humans who were pretending to be a better version of an AI that was trained on human writing.” “This circuitous technique is called “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” or RLHF”
• “it was relatively easy to spot bad output from a language model. It looked like gibberish. But this gets harder as the models get better — a problem called “scalable oversight.”” “This trajectory means annotation increasingly requires specific skills and expertise.”
• of interest: RLHF annotation landscape

How Nigerians are using WhatsApp groups to fight food inflation

• “Group moderators like Goodness communicate with food producers or suppliers to negotiate prices and also oversee deliveries to members.”

Largest Dataset Powering AI Images Removed After Discovery of Child Sexual Abuse Material

Black box gaslighting’ challenges social-media algorithm accountability

• “Introducing a concept Cotter termed as “black box gaslighting,” she highlighted how shadowbanning denial has led to users’ self-doubt and second-guessing of what they know about how the systems work.”

Papers

Critical technocultural discourse analysis

Distributed Blackness

Christin, A., & Lu, Y. (2023). The influencer pay gap: Platform labor meets racial capitalism. New Media & Society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231164995

Effects of Algorithmic Trend Promotion:
Evidence from Coordinated Campaigns in Twitter’s Trending Topics

“Shadowbanning is not a thing”: black box gaslighting andthe power to independently know and credibly critique algorithms

Blair, G., Cooper, J., Coppock, A., & Humphreys, M. (2019). Declaring and diagnosing research designs. American Political Science Review, 113(3), 838-859.

Schneider, L. T. (2017). The ogbanje who wanted to stay: The occult, belonging, family and therapy in Sierra Leone. Ethnography, 18(2), 133–152. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26359170

Ecological Reparation: Repair, Remediation and Resurgence in Social and Environmental Conflict, Chapter 26 – Ordinary Hope

Oliver L. Haimson, Daniel Delmonaco, Peipei Nie, and Andrea Wegner. 2021. Disproportionate Removals and Differing Content Moderation Experiences for Conservative, Transgender, and Black Social Media Users: Marginalization and Moderation Gray Areas. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 5, CSCW2, Article 466
(October 2021), 35 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479610

Shi, Annie and Zhang, Dennis and Chan, Tat and Hu, Haoyuan and Zhao, Binqiang, Using Algorithmic Scores to Measure the Impacts of Targeting Promotional Messages (October 30, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4262156 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4262156

Karakayali, N., Kostem, B., & Galip, I. (2018). Recommendation Systems as Technologies of the Self: Algorithmic Control and the Formation of Music Taste. Theory, Culture & Society, 35(2), 3-24. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276417722391

Statistics | Yeah. I’m reading statistics for fun over break 🤷🏾‍♀️

https://learningstatisticswithr.com/book/

https://github.com/microsoft/ML-For-Beginners/tree/main/1-Introduction/1-intro-to-ML

https://www.openintro.org/book/os/

https://www.statisticshowto.com/probability-and-statistics/hypothesis-testing/

Projects

How Big is YouTube?

https://tech-speculative.github.io/

https://medium.com/@hugo.torche/hunter-x-hunter-text-mining-c8cb721620e4

PhD’ing: Teaching Assistant I

I thought this would be valuable to share because I realized I had no idea what TA’ing(Teaching assistant) was or what it could look like for me when I first arrived to Cornell.

Granted, what I share below is not indicative of the TA experience across the board. A Teaching Assistantship encompasses many different skills and roles that are set by the professor of a class. For some, it can be heavily student facing and sometimes it’s not(which was my case)! Both, I think, are valuable ways of getting a sense of the ‘Backend’ of a class and the level of planning that goes into implementing a class.

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At a Thanksgiving celebration, I had a conversation with my advisor and he asked me how my first semester TA’ing went.

I think that now I’ve completed the semester I can properly digest the experience and write my thoughts down here.

NK JEMISIN: BUILDING OUR WORLD BETTER

Bartels World Affairs Lecture

October 4, 2023, 5:30pm

Klarman Hall

The lecture asks: how can we use our creativity to plan and build for a future that is equitable, sustainable, and good?

To be quite honest, I have never read her work and I had only learned of her name from a housemate who had at the beginning of the fall semester so to see her featured as a speaker felt like a moment of synchronicity.

So I bought a ticket and I went. I took notes during the lecture so that I could review it later and see how I could see my own work or to be more precisely see the value in my own speculative fiction writing and especially in making it part of my A-exam. I’m doing something that is a unheard of and for me, its hard to feel a sense of legitmacy given the rarity of using speculative fiction as a form of knowledge sharing within tech academia.

The lecture began with N.K Jemisin introducting herself as “Nora”. I was surprised to learn that Nora had spent 20 years in higher eduction as a counseling/student development, career counselor and director of experiential eduction/acadmic counselor and program director. Her specialties include working with underrepreented groups in STEM and adults ‘in transition’ midlife crisis). She’s also a giant nerd. I felt a sigh of relief to see that a black woman had survived and had thrived (by escaping) academia. She knew her shit! she was humble and she was funny. The more I listened to her the more entranced I became by her words.

Nora addresses why fiction writing is underestimated:

“People think of fantasy as “kid stuff” about dragons and unicorns

Fantasy is often thought about the past, no it’s about the present and future too.

“In science fiction, I can do anything”

It makes it a perfect medium to think about reality.

Themes in her work: oppression, climate change, bigotry, enriching, fascism

Inspirations: American history (“The kind that’s banned in Florida”).her most famous novel was written in resonance with the Ferguson uprising. “As she watched tanks rolling down the streets” – how do process a country that hates you so much that they bring out tanks and uzis? “

Nora defines world-building and shares world-building in her works:

World building (gerund): storytelling through setting and social structure

“The fifth season”, every age must come to an end

• Wanted to make it very unlike earth as we know it.
• Much more seismically active than our world
• People have developed the same ability that dogs and other animals have in real life, sensing earthquakes (morphology)
• One race has natural ash filtering hair (morphology and radiation)
• Culture built around frequent extinction level events (acculturation)
• “Orogenes” trated as state ownedslaves
• They are like earth benders from avatar the last Airbender”

“The city we became”

• Set in modern day NYC
• Cities “come to life” once they reach a certain point (universe)
• Ordinary human beings become “avatars” of the city, able to manifest city magic (morphology)
• Gentrification is their nemesis (power)
• At one point the characters are attacked by monstrous starbochs franchise (ecology)
• Yes you need to do world building even when you a writing about a real place

How fantasy writers build worlds – N.K shares outcomes of a hour workshop: first hour on macro, second on micro.

Building a world by committee (an act of collective imagination)

• Things participants have come up with:
  • Angry birds world:  an avian species evolves intelligence and decides its pissed offf about all the hot wings: war against the local primate species
  • Unusable oceans: much like our wold except the gulf streams is sapient and hungry
  • Pizzaworld: a group of hungry tweens came up with a planet that had 12 perfectly wedge-shaped continents – what happens if humanity develops on a pizza shaped continent?

she breaks down definitions:

Macroworldbuilding: crafting the physical setting in which the society and story take place

Microworledbuilding: crafting a society that character will exist within (what might the characters desire might be and. How the the world push or impede it)

Nora walks us through examples of each:

MACROBUILDING:

Planet

Continents

Climate

Ecology

Culture

In the city we became, There’s a completely different metaphysics – the cities come to life

What kind of planet do we have?

How do we choose continents and how they jigsaw together?

Where do hurricanes and the really story parts come to be ? Where does the rain drops?

We want to create a wold that feels plausible.

What stops writers from doing something novel? Readers are skeptics so you have to make it as realistic as possible and add the fantastical laters (“the dragons go down easier, later”)

Broken Earth – what would the world be like if we all lived on the same continent?

-> fiction writers aren’t selling reality, we’re selling plausibility

Most people think they are experts on how the world works

Readers usually allow you one “whopper” – but not more

This limits writers to familiar settings

MICROBUILDING:

Species

Morphology

Radiation

Acculturation

Power

Role

This is where she really gets into connecting worldbuilding to our world. Fiction is here to interrogate reality.

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ALL OF THIS IS CHANGEABLE.

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The point of this exercise is to challenge our assumptions of how societyy is constructed.

How regular people create worlds

This is the part where things get “controversial”

(Please feel free to walk out or in the case of this blog, click out)

• We get a little strange (and sometimes violent) when we believe our identities are under threat
• Identity as personal vs identity as in-group/out-group policing
• (The idea of who they are is rooted in who they aren’t) – a man who is “not being feminine” or “not supposed to cry” as opposed to a man is supposed to be noble etc.
• We react to facts that threaten our identities as if they are personal attacks – and we frequently double down rather than adapt to the new facts
• (My thoughts: what would the world be if we didn’t react negatively to new information that  puts us in the out group…well I think that we are afraid to be alone)

It’s important to remember that we created our world as it currently exists. These were choices and different choices are plausible”

“Why does the international olympic committee exclude people with intersex hormone variation but not other natural variations? There are choices.

Does being intersex make a differencea/ but myostatin differences 

There have been many cultures that build themselves around different priorities from ours.”

Speak it into existence – How do we make new choices?

Speak it into existence …or don’t

• Special note: there are sometimes good reasons to resist change…but are actually resisting for those reasons?
• It shouldn’t come from fear but rather from concerns about their implications
• Nora uses her father who doesn’t want to buy an iPhone. There are good reasons to not want an iPhone.
  • His argument: 5g gives you cancer
  • Everytime “I call him a luddite” he is delighted! His identity is around being “contrarian and resistant”
  • His reasons have nothing to do with what he is saying but out of fear.

Speak it into existence: why? why might we care to do anything?

• I became an infinitely better writer once I realized just how much of reality was total fantasy
• Think tanks, advertisers, and troll farms use this to manipulate reality to their desires
• We are being blasted with a firehose of disinformation 
• The willingness to question, learn, and push back is our only defense
• Why should they be the ones to build our world?

Example: There are only about 11 people who are filing most of the book bans in the country. 11 people are doing this to us.

Why should 11 people get to reshape our society?

The world is currently a very bad novel…

• We’re gonna have to Wikipedia edit this sucker
• We all need to become better readers and writers
• Example. A beta reader pushed back on an element of her book being “unrealistic”…but then it happened.
  • And then Eric Addams did it ( no a mayoral candidate wont just stop and start ranting about quantum physics)
• We are going to have to fight for those corrections
• “History is made by the people who edit wikipedia these days”

Repeat after me:

“We are each others copy editor!

Even the worst novel can be fixed. So let’s get to work!”

The End

The evening concluded with Nora sitting down listening to us fangirling over her.

Here N.K Jemisin appears in discussion with esteemed falculty.

I personally was a bit taken a back from this moment of the lecture. I would have liked to have seen her more in conversation with students instead. I also wished that the panel was a bit more diverse (socioeconomically, perhaps get another black woman on the stage?) and not just faculty. I also found it a bit … strange to watch them echo back her work to her in away that seemed to prioritize their knowledge of her work rather than actually asking her questions. My disappointment was further underscored by the fact that absolutely no student questions were presented to hereven though the organizers tried to collect them. While it was understood that we would not get to everyone – maybe a few would have been nice. Of course, it is important to consider her own comfort levels.

“I have to catch up with the students. I have to retain my own path of questioning. I’m 51 and I’m becoming stubborn. It is right to question reality. The rest of us need to keep doing that.” – I really admired these words from her. I wish that her belief could have been better reflected in the format of the lecture.

but the lecture did end on a bit of a grim note:

On the book bans,

“I want to push back on what I said earlier – it’s not just 11 people, it’s 11 people backed by billionaires – If I have a billionaire in my back pocket the world would look very different too” 

My shoulders couldn’t help but slump a bit. Again, here money gives you access to the ink that writes reality.

Overall, I was thankful that I could join this lecture. It was inspiring to see someone who I could very well be in the future!

NOTE: the words belong to the illustrous, N.K. JEMISIN. I merely took notes and added my own thoughts, hopes, aspirations where I thought necessary as I reflect on the event.

Participating in my First Everrrr Roundtable: “Envisioning an Equitable AI Future”

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Hosts | Christina Harrington & Angela D. R. Smith of Data & Society.

Date | Weds., June 7, 2023 at 2 PM ET

Participants | Apryl Williams, Avriel Epps-Darling, Brandeis Marshall, Fallon Wilson, Ireti Akinrinade, Jennifer Otiono, Joan Mukogosi, Jurnell Cockhren, Mutale Nkonde, Philip Butler, Raven Veal, Roderic Crooks, S. Craig Watkins, Tawana Petty

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I was honored to be part of the 2nd session of this series, a convening of black changemakers within the equitable tech space.

My advisor congratulated and encouraged me to take this opportunity, for three reasons:

1. this is an area where I have growing expertise, so I have something to say

2. this is an opportunity to network

3. speculative design is one of the methods that bridges between my interest in literary writing and social science research, so it’s an opportunity to think about whether that’s something I want to do more of

Entering this conversation, I wasn’t sure what my contribution would be since I’m still early in my career. At this point, I had taken classes such as 1) Governing Human-Algorithm Behavior (Spring 2022) with Nathan Matias and 2) Human AI Research and Design with IS’s own Qian Yang (Spring 2023) as foundations for my understanding of AI systems.

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Activities:

Discussion

We looked over the Blueprint for an Artificial Intelligence Bill of Rights | The White House where we posited questions such as:

1) Who is the audience for this Bill? how might the language used to construct this “Bill of Rights” tell us about the values and goals of the people writing this Bill? does this “Bill of Rights” have any teeth?

From there we branched into:

2) How do we create a more equitable AI future? is it the data, is it a technical issue, is it a people issue?

3) What do we envision an equitable AI future to look like?

4) What can we say about our needs as people when AI AI generation tools enable black people to envision themselves as magical and transcendent?

My biggest question was:

5) What role do enforceability and reparations (Algorithmic Reparations) play when we introduce “rights” as part of the conversation on Algorithmic bias? Rights suggest that it would need to be protected by some law or agency of some sort. Who is that enforcing body, and do we have the means to build such an agency?

Some other key points that I really enjoyed:

• centering the knowledge of those not prioritized – black leaders such as church leaders, barbershops, teens, and movies/ books as places where black people can be educated about AI and its capabilities.

• Feeling affirmed. I found that the head-nod to film and literature as sources of knowledge helped me to see my contribution as someone who is combining my speculative literary writing with social science research within the equitable tech has an important role in education, spreading information, and pushing people to dream up new capabilities for how tech can help them live lives that support wellbeing and imagination.

• An important point. In generating ways to assure that black people are not left behind or are somehow less capable of constructing their own technological futures, such conversations should be grounded in the fact that black people have been the past, the present, and the future of creating technological solutions and cultures.

MiroBoard

This collaborative activity entailed filling up blank miroboards that had a prompt or some question, such as “What does an equitable AI future look like?”

note: I wish I could remember all of my sticky notes contributions, but I don’t *sigh*

To name a few, I contributed posts such as: “ownership! and data is seen as an asset that can be quantified and leveraged” in support of self and communities, and “human passion and creativity is not replaced” (slide 1)

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Conclusion

We ended this 3-hour long convening with possible next steps.

1) we should continue conversations such as these and invite excluded (“non-experts”) voices to join our conversations.

2) we could write a manuscript generated from the information our discussion produced.

3) Invitations to network and connect outside of this space for further discussion and creation.

I left the convening with pieces of knowledge that I hadn’t considered before or an understanding which further allowed me to further integrate the knowledge I’ve gained from my own readings from my research and from the discussions I’ve had with CAT Lab members. On a more personal note, I struggle with social anxiety so I was proud of myself for putting myself out there and encouraging myself to speak up and to own what I knew.

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Some Suggested Readings:

1. Darrell M. West and John R. Allen, “How artificial intelligence is transforming the world”, Brookings (2018)
2. Ruha Benjamin, “Assessing risk, automating racism”, Science (2020)
3. “Global Perspectives on AI Ethics Panel #6: Unpacking the challenges of ethics in AI, the intersection of AI and data activism, and the philosophy of AI in smart cities”, Medium (2022)
4. Clàudia Figueras, Harko Verhagen, and Teresa Cerratto Pargman. 2021. Trustworthy AI for the People? In Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 269–270. https://doi.org/10.1145/3461702.3462470
5. James Francis, “Unveiling the Risks of AI for Black and Brown Communities”, Uptown (2023)
6. Sherrell Dorsey, Upper Hand: The Future of Work for the Rest of Us, Wiley (2022)
7. Josh Taylor and Alex Hern, “‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton quits Google and warns over dangers of misinformation”, The Guardian (2023)
8. Yoshua Bengio, Max Tegmark, and Tawana Petty, “Artificial Intelligence ‘Godfathers’ Call for Regulation as Rights Groups Warn AI Encodes Oppression”, Democracy Now! (2023)
9. Lauren Feiner, “OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to testify before Congress for the first time next week”, CNBC (2023)
10. Catherine Knight Steele, Digital Black Feminism, New York University Press (2021)
11. Rashida Richardson et al., “Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice”, New York University Law Review (2019)
12. Billy Perrigo, “OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic”, TIME (2023)
13. Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and Free Radicals, “The Algorithmic Ecology: An Abolitionist Tool for Organizing Against Algorithms”, Medium (2020)
14. Romi Morrison, “Voluptuous Disintegration: A Future History of Black Computational Thought, Digital Humanities Quarterly (2022)

Meeting CASBS fellows

A quick picture outside of the CASBS complex. Reunited and it feels so gooooood!

After I finished CRA-WP for the women’s event in San Francisco, I boarded the train for an hour-long ride to Palo Alto. I was to spend the day at CASBS to have my advisor meeting and to learn more about CASBS and the kind of work they do there.

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What is CASBS?

Situated on bucolic hills overlooking Stanford University, CASBS, or the Center for Advanced Study in the Social Behavioral Sciences, has hosted scientists and scholars engaged in pioneering research for decades. Here participants are given the space to think about critical issues of our time and to form strategies for evidence-based policy and solutions. Essentially, CASBS is an incubator for leading human-centered knowledge to design a better future for society.

It’s super cool that my advisor was selected as a fellow!

2022 – 2023 Fellows

We visited the CASBS library – a collection that represents works donated or reported to CASBS by individual fellows or their publishers. Maybe my advisor’s work is going to find a home here too! As I looked around, I picked up some of the books that caught my eye:

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Who were some of the spectacular people I got to meet?

Maisha Winn– Education | UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS

Angela Aristidou – Management | UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

Nitsan Chorev – Sociology | BROWN UNIVERSITY

Anne L. Washington, PhD |  Public Interest Technologist  | NYU Steinhardt School

• Anne was not a CASBS fellow at the time that I visited but she was at CASBS for a week or so to do some work and she kicks-ASS!

It was an amazing opportunity to meet each of them. I joined their lunch and listened to them speak to each other and woah – it’s very much a different language and they speak it with such dexterity. I watched them succinctly package and deliver knowledge to each other in a way that supports their work and creates intellectual bonds that will follow them beyond their time at CASBS. It astounds me that they are able to retain so much information – they are walking libraries! This work is very much a big part of demonstrating one’s value and expertise in academia and I aspire to improve my own professional communication practice in the coming year.

Not only were they aspirational, but they were also incredibly gracious to me: I introduced myself and talked about my current research projects. I appreciated that they made me talk about my work and gave me this chance to practice presenting my work. They were enthusiastic about supporting my interests and providing feedback on how I could go about thinking about my work.

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I note this to remind myself (and to remind anyone who might be reading this that might need it) that improvement is incremental and it comes from these small moments. I have a tendency to wonder “Why am I not there yet? Why does my mind not yet work like that?” but writing this post and reflecting here helps me see that I am doing the work here and now but not only that, there are plenty of people who I’m meeting that have become part of my training in big and small ways. The ability to reaffirm yourself during the Ph.D. journey is critical to keep going at it, so find methods for you that work.

What that also looks like for me is finding ways to improve upon what I think needs work, so I signed up for my local Toastmasters and my advisor sent me The Shy Guide to Speaking Up: Grad Seminar Edition.

This was a great trip and thank you to my advisor and his assistant for their phenomenal organizational skills in making this trip possible 🙂

CRA-WP For Women

Reflecting on my time in San Francisco in Spring 2023.

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By the time I got to San Francisco, I felt more comfortable in my skin being at this sort of event. I knew what I wanted to get out of it and I took my time doing what I wanted to do. So pretty much any workshop talk I didn’t get to attend at IDEALS, I attended at the for women workshop. This meant I attended talks that were more geared towards the later years of the Ph.D. so I could get a clearer sense of what was to come and how I could begin thinking about my career and the needs I want it to fulfill.

I also took a closer look at the informational booths there. I saw booths from sponsors, companies looking to hire, and organizations providing aid to the success of grad students, by connecting them to resources. I found resources, such as:

IAAMCS is matching undergraduate & graduate mentees with academic, industry & graduate mentors.

a pamphlet I picked up at their table.

IAAMCS provides prospective and graduate mentees aid in preparing fellowship application materials.

In addition to any other fellowship databases that one might already have, IAAMCS provides a fellowship list as an additional resource. You just have to read the different fellowship requirements to see which ones will work for your situation.

Fellowships play an important role in one’s graduate experience it provides grad students the freedom to work on their research as opposed to having to do work for their advisor or teach classes to fund their studies. I’ve benefited from being granted two fellowships and they gave me the time I needed to make the pivot I wanted to make in my research interests.

I also met the co-hosts of the Modern Figures podcast, Dr. Kyla McMullen and Dr. Jeremy Waisome, a conversational-style podcast centered on elevating the experiences and voices of black women in computing disciplines.

They were ready to record me and invited me to be a guest on their podcast on the spot! In the future, I hope to be a guest on the show and share my stories and perspectives on technical, societal, and personal topics relevant to the world of computing. I think what they are doing is amazing! Just a quick glance at their podcast episodes makes me feel like I’m stumbling into a club of people just like me. And at the end of the day – I think that’s what these CRA-WP events were about, finding communities that can support you during this incredibly rigorous and often isolating journey in the Ivory Tower.

At the end of the conference, I visited Palo Alto to see my advisor and meet his colleagues at CASBS, a center hosted at Stanford University. But, I’ll get into that in a different post.

CRA-WP IDEALS

Reflecting on my time in Hawaii in Spring 2023.

A friend and former CRA-WP participant told me about CRA-WP as an opportunity for students in computing to meet other students like me and bind by listening to their research and go on outings, to find mentorship, to find valuable information relevant to my Ph.D. journey, and that most importantly, all of this was paid for via reimbursement.

As soon as I heard that, I didn’t waste any time hopping on the website and filling out the form – just in time for the November deadline.

In December, I was stunned to receive that I had been invited to – not just one but two! – participate in CRA-WP events in the spring: CRA-WP for IDEALS and CRA-WP for Women. I hadn’t expected either, frankly!

I felt pretty excited to have the opportunity to be able to travel to new locations such as San Francisco and Hawaii. I’m an east coast girl and I had never been to the west coast, so it felt good to broaden my horizons through travel and all the new people I met.

CRA-WP for IDEALS

Once, I got through my excitement I had to take a pause, especially on CRA-WP for IDEALS which would be happening in Hawaii, Honolulu. I engaged in two main lines of thinking: 1) Would I be contributing to the harms that US colonialism was bringing to the island and what was the role of research events such as CRA-WP in mediating or extending colonial practice? 2) How would CRA-WP engage with this history while it took place there?

In engaging with the first question, I accepted that yes – I would be participating in a form of harm if I was there on terms that the Hawaiian people did not prioritize.

I’m engaging with the second question, I was disappointed to realize that there were no organizational statements regarding the land or the struggles that the Hawaiian people were going through prior to, during, or after the event.

I accepted that to take action on my concerns meant that I would need to undertake individual actions and learning. I had to be frank that while there, I would need to prioritize this learning and engagement at the same level or even more than the CRA-WP activities that filled my time.

For me, this looked like education and engagement for building a less harmful relationship between myself as a visitor and the islands and their people:

1) Learning more about Hawaiian culture and history, but also how natives viewed Honolulu and its tourism industry. As an outsider, I had made a lot of assumptions and so it was a surprise when I learned that for many Hawaiians Honolulu was a Disney land version of their culture. This created a mental shift for me and made me re-evaluate and reconsider what was being excluded and removed and who it served for that erasure to occur.

2) Volunteer, donate, and further educate the public on initiatives such as the O’ahu water protectors.

I learned that the United States Navy military outpost at Red Hill (or Kapūkakī) has leaked 27,000 + gallons of jet-fuel and toxic suppression foam leak into the drinking water aquifers, located 100 feet below the fuel storage facility, that serve hundreds of thousands of O’ahu families depend on over the last decade. Local families have complained about long-term health issues associated with contaminated water. Local officials and environmental activists continue to do the work of calling for this facility to be shut down, de-fueled, moved, and for affected people to have their health issues, associated with the poisoned water, addressed.

Is this enough? absolutely not. The work must continue even after I leave the island. I don’t quite know how and what that will look like, but I will find my way and will update this post as opportunities arise.

A respected Information Science colleague and scholar, Aspen Omapang, was there to greet me when I arrived at the hotel hosting the CRA-WP conference. I learned quite a bit about her and her family’s connection to the islands and the ways it has contributed to the identity and loving care of a friend.

I felt incredibly honored when she draped the Lei around my shoulders, as a token of greeting. The scent of the flowers was strong and fragrant, I couldn’t help but gently sniff the flowers throughout the welcoming reception. There, those who had already arrived gathered to eat and mingle. I was a bit nervous but thankfully my excitement took over!

It was a great opportunity to think about, craft, and execute my elevator pitch about who I was and what I was interested in as a scholar. The number of people meant that I had to do this multiple times and it made me think about what were the implications for how and why I described myself. *cue identity crisis* was I a social science researcher, was I becoming a computational scholar, was I critical, was I an AI researcher, a Human-AI interaction researcher, and designer? I felt nervous that I wasn’t sure how to describe myself – maybe I was all those things – but I suppose this is part of the process of the Ph.D. process, especially when you are someone who is super curious and pivots interests like myself.

It didn’t help that I spoke to a sponsor who walked away without saying anything after I shared my research interests but I think that’s part of the process and is valuable feedback in itself. With the kind of research that I’m doing, the art of persuasion is a huge part of the work in academia and I have a ways to go in demonstrating to the field the value of my work to different people and different goals. I felt suddenly that things were getting very real.

If nothing else, I realized that I needed to find a way to describe my research in a way that was legible to both myself and the different communities that I would want to become more familiar with and frankly, the communities I did not want to be a part of.

While there I did so much:

• I befriended folks who I could hang out with and say “hi!” to at future conferences. I found someone who is interested in evaluating AI systems and we set up a time to Zoom call after the conference so we could have more in-depth conversations about our shared interests.

• I went paddle boarding for the first time!

• I walked the Diamond Head trail with a new conference friend!

• …and more!

Summer Reading List – May

This is a living document and is subject to change.

The International Affiliation Network of YouTube Trends. Platt, E.L., Bhargava, R., & Zuckerman, E. (2015). International Conference on Web and Social Media.

Co-Writing with Opinionated Language Models Affects Users’ Views. Maurice Jakesch, Advait Bhat, Daniel Buschek, Lior Zalmanson and Mor Naaman. (2023).Proceedings of the ACM CHI.
[Pre-print] [Abstract]

The Effect of Twitter’s Trending Topics Page on Tweet Volume. Jospeh Schlessing, Maurice Jakesch, Dean Eckles and Kiran Garimella. (2023). Proceedings of the AAAI ICWSM.
[Pre-print][Abstract]

How Different Groups Prioritize Ethical Values for Responsible A.I.. Maurice Jakesch, Zana Buçinca, Saleema Amershi and Alexandra Olteanu. (2022). Proceedings of the ACM FAccT.
[Paper][Pre-print][Abstract]

Assessing the Effects and Risks of Large Language Models in AI-Mediated Communication. Maurice Jakesch. (2023).Cornell University ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
[PDF][Abstract

Human Heuristics for AI-Generated Language Are Flawed. Maurice Jakesch, Jeff Hancock, and Mor Naaman. (2023).Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120.11.
[Paper][Pre-print][Pre-registration][Abstract