Month: December 2015

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Watson as Life Coach

IBM's Watson analyzes a Twitter account of a user

IBM’s Watson analyzes a Twitter account of a user

Interesting story recently on NPR about Watson, the IBM super computer that won the “Jeopardy” game show. It apparently has now been retooled to analyze texts written by an individual on social media in order to provide insight into personality traits. The assumption is that our choice of words unconsciously reflects who we are. In itself this is nothing new. In the 1990’s James Pennebaker used a computer to analyze individuals’ use of personal pronouns. An abundant use of the first person pronoun, according to Pennebaker is revelatory of someone’s personality and/or state of mind:

If someone uses the pronoun “I,” it’s a sign of self-focus. Say someone asks “What’s the weather outside?” You could answer “It’s hot” or “I think it’s hot.” The “I think” may seem insignificant, but it’s quite meaningful. It shows you’re more focused on yourself. Depressed people use the word “I” much more often than emotionally stable people. People who are lower in status use “I” much more frequently.

According to the NPR story, the Watson program goes well beyond the analysis of pronoun use. It created “personality dictionaries”, correlating words in English to 5 different personality traits, with the acronym of OCEAN: “O for openness, C for conscientiousness, E for extroversion, A for agreeableness and N for neuroticism”. Texts an individual has written on Twitter, Facebook, blog posts and in other online services are collected and parsed. For the story, Facebook posts for the reporter, Aarti Shahani, were analyzed, which she found reflected fairly accurately at least some of her major personality traits. But, as she pointed out in the story, our online identity may be quite different from the identity we have in other contexts. Our behavior and language may differ significantly if we are at home with family, for example, rather than in the workplace. Likewise, our language use online may depend on the medium being used, as well as on the purpose of the communication, and on the particular situation or people we are addressing.

Watson was less accurate in its function as an “emotions analyzer”; it misread the emotions behind some of the statements in letters between Shahani and her ex-boyfriend. You can try out how well your emotions are analyzed using a trial version of the Tone Analyzer available online. A demo version of the writing analysis tool is also available. Given the interest in both big data and social media, it seems likely we will see more such tools, probably as mobile apps. One could well imagine their use in dating services.

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Blackface

Sven Gatz, a Flemish minister, in blackface

Sven Gatz, a Flemish minister, in blackface

There were many stories this past year dealing with cultural appropriation in one way or another. In the US a number of universities issued guidelines to students before Halloween, advising them not to wear costumes that represent cultures to which they do not belong. One of the specific cautions was the use of blackface, dark makeup used to make someone appear to be black. That has been a controversial issue in Belgium and the Netherlands, surrounding the tradition of “Black Pete” ( Zwarte Piet), the companion to St. Nicholas. This month, the Flemish minister of culture, Sven Gatz, was heavily criticized for a tweet in which he appeared as Black Pete. Earlier this year, the Belgian Foreign Minister likewise appeared controversially in blackface. While the tradition is reminiscent of other companions of St. Nick, in Germany (Knecht Ruprecht) or Austria/Bavaria (Krampus), who either help distribute treats or punish misbehaving children, the Black Pete tradition has been criticized because of the belief that it may reflect lingering racial attitudes from colonial days, an especially delicate issue in Belgium because of the legacy of African atrocities under the rule of King Leopold II in the 19th century. Others believe figures like Black Peter or the Swiss Schmutzli (i.e. “Little Dirty”) are carryovers from pagan ceremonies, associated with the ceremonial use of ashes.

In any case, the appearance of such figures in the US would not be socially acceptab;e. The recent case of Rachel Dolezal brought out strong reactions to what was perceived as an attempt to use skin darkeners and an African-American hair style to pass as black. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Dolezal responded to the accusation of using blackface:

That was a pretty harsh accusation. I didn’t expect that at all because blackface, you don’t look like a light-skinned black woman, you look like a clown. It’s made to be a mockery. Blackface is not pro-black. Blackface is not working for racial justice. Blackface is not trying to undo white supremacy. I would never make a mockery of the very things I take the most seriously…Do we ask women why they airbrush freckles on themselves or why they change their noses? We don’t ask if somebody’s boobs are real or not. I do my hair and my makeup and everything according to how I feel I’m beautiful. Sometimes I use a spray bronzer, sometimes I don’t…Before this happened, nobody was asking me why are you lighter or darker on certain days of the week, depending on how much time I had to get myself together that day; if I had time to give myself a glow. And if I didn’t, I was out the door.

In the interview she says she has been using braids and weaves in her hair for years and does not see that as cultural appropriation, but as a compliment to black women. In fact, as she points out, women have for generations been using perms to change their hair styles. For many people, what is troublesome about the Dolezal case is not so much the change in appearance, but the desire to pass as black without the trials of growing up African-American in the US.