Bibliographic record
Abstract
As an artist and engineer, I created The Great Tit is a Bird, a science fiction storytelling project that follows Black and Brown femmes and transfemmes, the losses they survive, and the ways they shape our high-tech era even as they are pushed to the margins. The project consists of an audio drama, 3D-animated narrative (fiction) films, and forthcoming animated documentary shorts, and immersive reality films. It was launched by Black and Brown women in the United States and Kenya as a way to creatively examine relationships between elite neoimperial academic spaces centered by the Global North, and women’s networks centered by the Global Majority. The project probes issues its creators have experienced firsthand, including techno-colonization, research misconduct, and threats to bodily/embodied sovereignty. In addition to gender and race, The Great Tit is a Bird explores vulnerability related to other marginalized identities its creators hold. These include disability, carceral status, socioeconomic status, and immigration status. While The Great Tit is a Bird is directly inspired by a range of real-world examples, from the East African women’s empowerment group Inua Kike to the male-dominated academic networks connected to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, its focus on low-income people of color supports its ultimate liberatory goal: survivors of neocolonial aggression affirming solidarity for each other and their community. I originally launched The Great Tit is a Bird during the 2020 pandemic lockdown to process personal trauma—the death of a parent, a reckoning with childhood domestic abuse—as well as the professional challenges I’ve experienced as a student and teacher, conditioned by the banking system so prevalent in college-level STEM education. Since then, I have started to use The Great Tit is a Bird as a pedagogical tool amongst small groups of students. This feels like a genuinely transgressive act for three reasons: the project’s sensitive, personal themes; the sharing of such themes with STEM students conditioned to marginalize their own identities and experiences while in the classroom; and the cultivation of community within an engineering school. Like bell hooks, who originally regarded teaching as a job that would support her vocation as a writer (2) and eventually grew to realize that it was a vital part of her creative practice, I have grown to deeply value teaching as a time and space to cultivate creative community, particularly amongst underrepresented, underestimated, undervalued student technologists yearning to investigate, interrogate, critique and contribute to technical cultures. I am submitting excerpts from The Great Tit is a Bird (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSSgjIjqx_paVQXWGaUXMQMTVoAC7Yp_x), which I would discuss with resonant passages from Teaching to Transgress and other relevant texts. I’m grateful for the opportunity to develop this new pedagogical tool, which I will use in sharing The Great Tit is a Bird with my students. To watch additional materials, visit https://thegreattitisabird.com.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".