For my project I created a Twitter bot that tweets as Albus Dumbledore from beyond the grave. You can find the twitter profile here. Below is my artist’s statement, detailing the goals I had for this project, as well as the process I went through in creating the finished product.
Artist’s Statement
When I first read the description for the Haunted Media Project, I immediately knew which of the course readings I would use to inspire my work. In our exploration of the expressions and consequences of death on the Internet and social media, there were two articles that stuck with me: Natalie Zarrelli’s “Dial-a-Ghost on Thomas Edison’s Least Successful Invention: The Spirit Phone,” and Ethan Chiel’s “What Happens to a Twitter Bot After Its Maker Dies?”
Between these two articles, I noticed a commonality: the idea of communication with either a person or idea that has passed on. Thinking back to what we witnessed in the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back,” I was particularly drawn to Thomas Edison’s idea of there being a possibility of, “personalities which have left this earth communicat[ing] with us” (Zarrelli). I believe that many people would want to communicate with their loved ones who have passed on, so I drew on that idea and decided that I wanted to create something that could, using scientific methods, as Edison intended, allow this possibility to become a reality (Zarrelli). Looking at the different possibilities for how I could achieve this communication, however, I was not sure that a phone would be the proper method. Theoretically, it would be wonderful for us to give a phone call to our loved ones who have passed away, but I wanted to come up with something more unique.
With an increasing percentage of the world taking part in social media, the world is now more connected than ever. In relation to death and the death experience, this connectivity is seen as something that can be a good thing. According to an article published in The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, social media offers seriously ill and dying individuals the ability to communicate with distant friends and family, and offers a place of support for loved ones, by connecting them to people who have gone through similar experiences (Billingsley & Currie 435-436). In fact, more and more people are turning to social media and the Internet when there is something that they do not know and when they are seeking advice on situations (Billingsley & Currie 435). Knowing this, I became interested in exploring my idea of communicating with the dead through the use of social media.
Though we had read articles exploring Facebook’s effects on the grieving process, and how Facebook has changed memorialization, we did not delve too deeply into Twitter. As Twitter is one of the most used forms of social media in the world, this surprised me. Twitter is considered quite similar to blogging—though it can only be done in 160 characters—and has such, has been shown to have emotionally cathartic effects (Keim-Malpass & Steeves 378). Tweeting and following the tweets of others undergoing similar painful situations, such as a death or serious illness, can help alleviate some of the pain and encourages acceptance and progression through the necessary steps in the grieving process (Keim-Malpass & Steeves 378). Thus, I believed I should embark into uncharted territory and form some form of memorialization service using Twitter.
Not really knowing where to begin with Twitter, I drew inspiration from the Chiel article about Twitter bots. According to Chiel, “bots…are programs that use an application program interface (API) to post to or pull information from various services.” In simpler terms, a Twitter bot is able to run a program that sorts information to generate tweets. The types of bots that exist are as varied as their creators: “programmers, artists, journalists, and anyone else who feels like making bots” can create bots that, “sort pixels, suggest Marxist startup ideas, or behave more like teens than teens” (Chiel). What attracted me to the idea of using a Twitter bot for this project was the low maintenance of the bot. For example, some bots can run uninterrupted for three years without any effort from their creator (Chiel). I also knew that I needed to create something that could function on its own, without my having to constantly draft a tweet and then send it. As this is a Haunted Media Project, I found a sort of poetic justice in creating something that could outlive me. The Twitter Bot could be doubly haunted—outliving its creator, and the person it was created to memorialize.
The only problem with generating a Twitter bot, is that I am not a programmer. I do not know how to code, and I am blissfully unaware of the inner workings of user interfaces and, honestly, computers in general. Thankfully, there are quite a few services available that provide step-by-step instructions on how to create your very own Twitter bot. I used one of these instruction guides, created by Zach Walen. The guide was extremely helpful in walking me through the process to create an autonomous, self-tweeting Twitter Bot. Another aspect of Walen’s guide that made it even more accessible to my programming-illiterate mind, was the fact that the majority of the program is run in a Google Sheet. Those interested, can view the Google Sheet containing my “code” here.
For my Twitter bot, I chose to memorialize one of the most beloved, but deceased character’s in the Harry Potter franchise: Albus Dumbledore. Beginning this project, I knew that I did not want my Twitter Bot to simply tweet out famous quotes of Dumbledore. While this would memorialize the character, it did not evoke my original goal of providing a form of communication with the deceased. I thought it would be fine for the Twitter bot to tweet out Dumbledore’s quotes occasionally, but I also was inspired to have the bot generate tweets that were original, yet still seemed as though they could have been said by Dumbledore. Walen’s guide provided a few options for how the Twitter bot could generate tweets, but keeping my goals in mind, I chose to use Walen’s guide for creating a Markov Twitter Bot. This means that my Twitter Bot runs on a Markov-chain algorithm to generate new tweets.
That sounds immensely intimidating and complex, but in reality is quite simple. A Markov chain is defined as, “a sequence of events the probability for each of which is dependent only on the event immediately preceding it” (dictionary.com). The “events” for my Markov chain are the words being tweeted out. On my google sheet I have a page where I entered everything that Dumbledore ever said in the books of the Harry Potter series (an exhaustive process—he speaks often and can be long-winded). To my understanding, the algorithm randomly selects a word to begin the tweet. It then scans through all of Dumbledore’s quotes until it finds a word that is highly probable of following the word selected before. This process continues until the tweet is generated.
Therefore, the final tweet is something that may never have been said by Dumbledore, no matter how likely it may seem. For example, the first tweet generated by the bot was, “It is no immediate danger.” I checked through my spreadsheet, and I have no record of Dumbledore ever uttering that specific sentence. Sometimes, however, the bot can create a nonsensical tweet. Immediately following “it is no immediate danger,” Dumbledore tweeted, “head of our words.” While not possessing a true meaning, I think that these nonsensical tweets still capture the eccentricity of Dumbledore, and still evoke his character as the reader tries to decode what the wise Dumbledore could mean with his strange musings.
All in all, I am extremely pleased with the final result of my Twitter Bot. I think that it accurately captures Dumbledore’s character, and provides a new outlet for continued communication with the character, though he is deceased and the book series has ended. Lastly, and I am most proud of this, I believe that my project demonstrates the efficacy of using Twitter as a way of continuing on a person’s presence after their death. While the bot cannot respond to messages, and therefore cannot carry on a conversation like the online reincarnated presence of Ash in “Be Right Back,” it still can provide new material that retains the essence of those that it seeks to emulate. Thus it serves as a way for people to still communicate with the dead, though it is not as two-sided as I wish it were.
I do believe that my project could be extrapolated and used to memorialize other, non-fictional persons as well. All that must be done to memorialize someone else would be to change the input of the Markov algorithm. With the Library of Congress attempting to archive all tweets, it would be incredibly simple to memorialize someone’s twitter persona. We would simply need to input all of their tweets to allow the Markov algorithm to generate new tweets. Thinking of the different services we have seen for memorialization—as well as Be Right Back—I could even see the creation of these Twitter bots being something that people eventually generate a profit of off, though I hope that it would always stick to my original plan of simply being a means for someone to still feel as though they are communicating with a deceased loved one.
Works Cited