The Ford project I worked on with Prof. Ho this summer studies Among Us, an online social deduction game that involves numerous strategic situations and exemplifies things like cooperation, betrayal, persuasion, and lying that are common in human interactions. We took advantage of game theory to analyze it theoretically and collect data from Let’s Play videos to gain a more empirical understanding.

The theoretical work started with a literature review on cheap talk models and lying, since we were attracted by the in-game chats during which players exchange (perhaps false) information. I then developed a simplified model featuring three stages, each corresponding to a part of the game, and connected by beliefs that are updated using Bayes’ Rule. Solving the model, I found several Markov perfect Bayesian equilibria that may describe how players interact in the game. This model will also provide foundations for adding players and strategies to the model to describe the original game in more detail.

Game trees for the first and second stages of the simplified model

On the empirical side of the project, I identified a preliminary list of 200 Let’s Play videos from YouTube and created a template spreadsheet to organize the information we would like to collect from the videos (chat transcripts, voting results, etc.). There is no good way of automating data collection as these videos vary in length and content, so we recruited workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk and volunteers from Reddit and Discord to help with filling out the spreadsheet for each video.

Parts of the data collection template spreadsheet

It was an amazing experience applying game theory to a real-life game and analyzing people’s strategic interactions from a video game, and I’m very grateful for the guidance of Prof. Ho. As more data is collected, we hope to find more about how people accuse/lie in the game and how other people respond to those behaviors.

Investigating the VHS collection at Vassar’s Thompson Memorial Library

I worked with Professor Augusto Hacthoun to inventory, investigate, and illuminate the Vassar Library’s collection of films by Cubans or about Cuba. We explored several avenues for developing our research, from scouring databases and studying copyright law to interviewing filmmakers.

We reviewed the library’s collection and compiled relevant films into a straightforward, searchable database. Nearly half of these films are on VHS, a format at risk of deterioration. Thus, I located distributors for DVD replacement copies and new films. I also gathered information on VHS preservation, which led me down a rabbit hole of studying copyright law. These sources will aid future efforts to maintain and expand the library’s film collection.

An interview with Michael Rubbo, the director of “Waiting for Fidel”

Moving beyond the library walls, we gathered information from film distributors, archivists, and filmmakers. We identified distributors selling films that could benefit the library’s collection. Certain films had no apparent distributor in the United States, leading us to contact sources such as the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) in Havana and the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles. We also contacted and interviewed several filmmakers. These conversations centered on each filmmaker’s works, as well as the broader practice of filmmaking in Cuba. These interviews proved to be very enlightening, and one of the highlights of this project.

Professor Hacthoun and I having a lively discussion

After amassing information from countless sources and individuals, I compiled it all into an online resource. I created bibliographies and browsable film categories on topics such as Cuba’s Special Period and AfroCuba. With this guide, Professor Hacthoun and I hope to make studying Cuban films easier and more accessible, even to those with no background knowledge. We want to emphasize that these films can be used in countless academic fields, as the many film themes and topics indicate. Ultimately, we hope to spread the word about Cuba’s rich history of producing and inspiring distinctive, innovative, and perhaps most importantly, entertaining cinema.

Our online resource, “Cuban Films at Vassar College”, is available at https://sites.google.com/vassar.edu/cubanfilms/

Below is a short video detailing one of our many visits to the Thompson Memorial Library’s DVD and VHS collections.

This summer, I was able to have the honor to assist Professor Peipei Qiu as a Ford Scholar student in documenting the testimony videos of the witnesses and victims of Imperial Japan’s military sexual slavery from Sanzao Island, Zhuhai, China that she collected in 2019 with the assistance of Liu Changyan, a Senior Instructor of Zhuhai Golden Coast Middle School, who helped her translate the local dialect in real time for some of the testimonies. 

The Asian-Pacifica War (1931–1945) was a theatre of World War II that fought in Asia and the Pacific Ocean. Within this, the full invasion of China was ignited by the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937. To occupy southern China and cut off the military resource supply line, Imperial Japanese troops occupied Sanzao Island in 1938 for over 7 years to use it as a military air base. During the Asian-Pacifica War, Imperial Japan had coerced a tremendous number of women from different countries into comfort stations to service the Japanese soldiers in occupied areas. Sanzao Island was just the same. 

We have testimonies from five Sanzao Island natives recorded in video and audio clips. The purpose of our project is to document these testimonies by assembling and adding English subtitles to them, so that these primary sources that are in native languages can reach the greater English-speaking audience population. The core of my work was to transcribe and translate the records with the assistance of Professor Qiu, Liu Changyan, and Huang Yuxia,a native of Zhuhai, to confirm accuracy and create a cohesive English-subtitled video of each individual’s testimonies. Professor Qiu and I would meet weekly and maintain close communication to discuss our work. I received a great amount of help from Professor Qiu in learning about the background of our project and proofreading the works. 

This summer under the Ford Scholars program, I worked with Professor Dustin Frye and Andy Kasper ’23 to create a semi-automated approach to historic data collection. The site for the development of this approach was the County Business Patterns dataset, a record of business statistics in each county by industry. Prior to the later 20^th century, this dataset was produced without the use of electronic recordkeeping, and these earlier versions of CBP exist only as physical copies and image-only scans.

For this project, we sought to turn these image-only scans into workable datasets, with the end goal of analyzing long-term changes in and consolidation of job availability by county. Because Optical Character Recognition software is prone to errors, we decided on a double-entry system, where outputs from both Google’s Tesseract and ABBYY’s FineReader could be combined, cross-referenced, and eventually consolidated into a singular output.

While Tesseract is freely available, it lacks ABBYY’s built-in ability to replicate tables; my work this summer focused on creating this functionality from the returned list of words and their positions on the page. Based on the results from this summer and given the greatly varying quality in the scans we used, I have a high level of confidence that this code could be expanded and generalized to be able to extract data from a wide variety of sources. While both OCR programs routinely make errors, they tend to make different, predictable errors (for example, “5,039” may be read as “S.039” or as “59039”, depending on which is used), and the reconciliation process to join the outputs from these two is able to take into account the errors each program is likely to make to produce a single dataset with much greater confidence than that from either of the sources alone.

In anticipation of the Olmsted bicentennial celebration in spring 2022, Professor Yvonne Elet and I are tracing the contributions of the preeminent Olmsted firm to the formation and development of the Vassar campus landscape. While Frederick Law Olmsted himself visited campus in 1868, the college periodically called upon the Olmsted firm for the next 65 years for their professional guidance in the ever expanding campus plan. As part of a larger project determining the collective Olmsted contributions to the Vassar Landscape over the years, this summer I embarked on a focused study of the work of Percival Gallagher, an Olmsted Brothers partner, who acted as consulting landscape architect from 1929-33.

Based on some 60 drawings from the Frederick Law Olmsted archive in Brookline MA, and extensive written materials collected from the Library of Congress and Vassar Special Collections, our study of Gallagher’s projects has required the collection, cataloguing, dating, cross referencing, and analyzing of this voluminous material. This research has not only indicated the effect Gallagher’s plans had on the rapidly developing terrain, but also has revealed the ways in which the still emerging professionalized field of landscape architecture related to a small somewhat insular institution such as Vassar. We are considering both where soil was moved, as well as how the bulldozer was directed.

As the inherent mutability of landscape makes it susceptible to perennial reimagination, a historical understanding of the campus situates our experience of present day landscape within a succession of visions. With this awareness, sites, paths, and topography all have greater meaning. Our work this summer, generously supported by the Ford Scholars program, will result in an exhibition on the Olmsted firm at Vassar, where much of Percy Gallagher’s work will be showcased. Caleb Mitchell.

I worked with Professor Frye and Aaron Mahr this summer to digitize census data from the 1950s and 60s tracking areas of employment in each county in the United States. When accessible this data will be valuable in understanding the development of America post WWII and Great depression. The data will allow us to track the geographic concentration of jobs across America, as well as a shift in the types of jobs. However, as of now this data is only in the form of scanned PDF pages from the physical books they were typewritten in. Hand entering this data is beyond time consuming and costly, so we worked on solutions to automate this process to be as hands off and accurate as possible.

An example of a page we were working to scan.

Using Optical Character Recognition software (OCR), we set out to scan about 4 or 5 years of data, with about 2500 pages per a year. We split the process into developing two different scans of each year, in order to compare later and create one master table. Aaron worked with the Tesseract package in R, while I worked on a process using ABBYY FineReader. Both of these steps posed their own challenges with some overlapping issues. For the ABBYY scan cleaning up places where the scan read poorly or the pages were faded was quite challenging and required some flexibility to design a process to fix or rescan those pages. Additionally we designed a process to use probabilistic matching link the scanned in SIC codes to a master list, making analysis and future table combining much easier.

Working on the project exposed me to the exciting push of research, data cleaning, and development. The process is always improving: working out automated or more linear approaches to previously laborious or confusing steps was very rewarding. Additionally, having the organization needed to plan a multi step process with many pieces was quite eye opening. While we only completed a scan of one year, the steps and processes in place will clear the way to the future scanning of later years.

Over the summer, I worked with Prof. Wayne Soon from the History Department to trace the history of medical care and insurance in the first decades of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Existing research on medical and workers’ histories of the PRC has generally downplayed the significance of labor insurance; our project, on the other hand, shows that labor insurance deeply affected both the lives of workers and their relationship with the state during this period in China. After its takeover in 1949, the new Communist government sought to provide universal healthcare for its citizens; however, the system it created to accomplish this goal faced numerous financial, political, and societal challenges over time. The goal of this project is to examine these challenges from the ground up.

Because I participated in this project remotely from China, I was able to access various Chinese libraries and archives in Beijing and Guangdong. During the first week of my research, I visited the National Library of China (NLC) and the Capital Library of China (CLC), where I found published volumes by government agencies and individual work units from the 1950s to 1970s on labor insurance. These include general policies that aimed to guide labor insurance work and reports on how labor insurance was implemented in certain work units.

(Special Collections of the Capital Library)

From these sources and drawing from Aiqun Hu’s work China’s Social Insurance in the Twentieth Century: A Global Historical Perspective, Prof. Soon and I discovered that the labor unions were key in administering the labor insurance program, which included providing a variety of medical, disability, and retirement benefits for workers in China. Thus, once back in Guangzhou, I searched for relevant materials at the Guangdong Provincial Archives (GPA). Following Hu’s argument that a process of decentralization within the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) beginning at around 1958 led to a similar decentralization in the administration of labor insurance, I found documents that shed light on how this decentralization gradually happened. Documents from the GPA also provide vivid details of the challenges individual labor unions faced when endeavoring to implement labor insurance on the ground. For instance, some municipal- and factory-level labor unions found hospitals unwilling to cooperate with them and comply with labor insurance policies when workers needed medical care. Another major challenge was the lack of expertise, especially in accounting, on the part of labor union personnel in charge of labor insurance work.

(The Guangdong Provincial Archives)

In sum, our project augmented existing research by highlighting the importance of labor insurance in shaping the relationship between the state and the workers in post-1949 China.

I spent my summer as a Ford Scholar educating high school students from the Poughkeepsie area on the Climate Crisis. Working alongside Professor Pinar Batur and fellow Ford Scholar Sasha Allison, I assisted in designing and teaching a curriculum for the ESCI Exploring Climate Summer Intensive course, mentored three students and began work on an ongoing literary analysis project.

A student’s art project focused on the impact of plastics on the Earth.

Throughout the month of June, Professor Batur, Sasha and I worked together to create a syllabus for our portion of the intensive that covered the basics of climate change and its global implications. The intensive itself ran for three weeks and was made up multiple sessions each day, typically morning and afternoon lecture sessions followed by a college workshop put on by the Exploring College program. We taught the morning sessions of the first and third weeks and were accompanied by the Environmental Cooperative’s Jen Rubbo and Vassar’s Sustainability Director Micah Kenfield who taught the remainder of the sessions. Our lectures covered essential topics surrounding the Climate Crisis such as the foundations of climate science, a history of anthropogenic climate change, the effects of fossil fuels on people and the environment, environmental racism, and climate policy, among others. Along with nightly readings related to our lectures, students completed an art project and a final research project based on material learned in class and presented both over Zoom.

A slide from one student’s final project on ocean acidification and coral reefs.

A slide from another student’s final project on environmental racism.

Outside of designing and teaching the curriculum, I also had the opportunity to mentor three students throughout the intensive and begin analysis work on Buket Uzuner’s series The Adventures of Misfit Defne Kaman. Creating and teaching this course served as an excellent learning opportunity for me and illuminated the power of education in creating change.

The research for our “Resilience Stories” project began with an investigation into presenting psychological information with a focus on psychological resilience and positive emotions. Me and my partner, Formosa Huang, began listening to podcasts and watching webinars from noted psychologists, including and especially Dr. Laurie Santos, creator of Yale’s most popular undergraduate course: The Science of Wellbeing. 

After seeing and hearing different ways of presenting information, we decided an interview format was most effective in terms of being engaging and fun to listen to. And after conducting a few practice interviews, we also decided we wanted to include aspects of practical resilience, or little habits and tricks we all can do to boost positive emotions and increase our resilience. Our idea culminated in a podcast that was also recorded on video, and would primarily contain an interview, either with someone who had a specific “resilience story” or someone who did not. Our goal was to find the everyday stories of resilience that we all have, whether we know it or not, and peel back the curtain as to the psychology and positive emotions being knowingly or unknowingly utilized by the interviewee. 

The final format for the podcast being presented is a short interview followed by a brief but deep dive into some of the research that has been done regarding the psychological benefits of the emotions being discussed in the podcast. In our sample interview with Formosa’s friend Bridget, the primary positive emotion is social connection and we look at research from social psychologist Dr. Nicholas Epley.