Christine Seo- Looking Outwards 10

Caroline Sinders is a machine learning designer, user researcher, artist, and digital anthropologist who produced the project, Feminist Data Set. She has been focusing on the intersections of natural language processing, artificial intelligence, abuse, and online harassment. She currently works at BuzzFeed/Eyebeam Open Labs and lives in Brooklyn, NY. She was born in New Orleans and has a masters from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program focusing on HCI, storytelling, and social media theory. Feminist Data Set is a project that started in October 2017 which calls to action to collect feminist data.  This data set compiles art works, essays, interviews, and books that are from, about or explore feminism and a feminist perspective. The series explores how data and interfaces can be agents of change within machine learning systems that are utilized by the public and private sectors of our daily lives.

Sinders was heavily influenced by the idea to remove bias within machine learning, which has to be manifested into a learning experience to teach or sway the algorithms. She also aims to initiate a standard for equity and equality, by centering collaboration in the creation of this data set. I thought that this project was very intriguing because she is a female artist that focuses on feminism. A lot of people are very hesitant to approach this topic, but I appreciate her effort to conceptually organize her thoughts into a data set and use it through design and machine learning. This concept and idea is very unique and different from all of the other ideas I’ve approached in looking outwards research, so it was great to find something that I strongly resonate with outside of visual forms of art!