Digital Roots, Afro Futures: Virtual Reality as a Tool for Cultural Preservation and Dissemination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research-creation project explores the representational and knowledge-dissemination potential of Virtual Reality experiences, for Traditional Afro-spiritual practices, within a Afro-futurism context. Virtual reality is continuing to grow in popularity and accessibility, as a creative medium, knowledge sharing medium, and form of entertainment. This development in new media culture includes spiritual and religious integration of VR. Virtual reality apps like BibleVR and TRIPP transcend their respective origin ideologies into virtual space. Due to the criminalization of Traditional-Afro Spiritual practices and religions in Jamaica in 1898, under the Obeah Law, there is a gap, between accessing and practicing Traditional-Afro Spiritual for Jamaicans and descendants. VR apps and experiences continue to emerge, but not ones that include African ideologies. Existing Black VR projects can be seen as doing crucial work for Black representation and speculation. However, Traditional-Afro-Spiritual practices are sparse in the domain, and this is purposeful. For Jamaicans, in Jamaica, engaging Traditional Afro-Spiritual practices can be seen as a is a fugitive act. This research-creation project interrogates the feasibility of representing and disseminating Obeah in Virtual reality. By integrating a multi-methodological approach of auto-ethnographic narration, from the perspective of a Jamaican Canadian, and Virtual World Building through a mixed approach of speculative and critical design, this research culminated in the creation of a VR quest-based exhibit inspired by Ifa and Obeah, with integrated theories of fugitivity by Fred Moten, and Afro-fabulation by Tavia Nyong’o.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".