The Chimeria Platform

Computational modeling of social categories can be found in a wide range of digital media works. For example, within computer role-playing games (RPGs), racial categorization is often used to style the visual appearance of a player’s avatar or trigger different canned reactions when conversing with a non-player character (NPC). In social media, users might join groups based on shared taste or categorize each other into groups such as “colleagues” or “family members” using privacy settings. However, in most such systems, category membership is determined in a top-down fashion. Members are often slotted into single, homogeneous groups, with no possibility for hybrid identities, identities that exist at the margins of groups, or identities that change over time. Taken holistically, such approaches have many limitations. These deficiencies are particularly visible when trying to accurately model the nuance of social category membership in the real world.