The 2026 Big Thinking Summit: Inflection Point introduced a new kind of Federation event. Built through an interdisciplinary open call for proposals, it created a national forum for exploring how humanities and social sciences knowledge can contribute to public life.
Several participants and presenters were invited to engage with the event in a rapporteur capacity. Chosen for the individual perspectives they brought to the Summit; they reflected on the conversations they witnessed unfolding across the program.
Reflections on EDID at the 2026 Big Thinking Summit
By Michael F. Charles J.D., Change Dezign Consulting
Introduction
The Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (the Federation) hosted the Big Thinking Summit in Edmonton, Alberta in June 2026. The event platformed nearly 100 research presentations, plenary remarks, workshops and panel discussions from Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) scholars across the country. Some 450 academics and doctoral students registered for the first event following the release of the Federation’s Strategic Plan, Inflection Point. The Federation team reports over 33% of the sessions explicitly engaged the subject of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Decolonization (EDID).
My Role as a Strategy and EDID Advisor
Retained as a strategy and EDID advisor to the Federation, I was asked to prepare a written reflection on the Summit from an EDID perspective. My role originates from the 2021 report, Igniting Change at paragraph 10 recommending the organization “hire a designated staff member with EDID expertise to support and evaluate Congress and other Federation events”.
What follows is not an exhaustive commentary or evaluation of the Summit per se. Multiple sessions were scheduled as concurrent offerings in discrete blocks of time, preventing attendance at more than one discussion per interval. The volume of sessions also made it difficult to ascertain and survey a representative selection. In the circumstances, I deliberately tried not to pursue sessions expressly foregrounding EDID in their titles as a means of gaining insight into its expression irrespective of the research inquiry. Put another way, I hoped to understand, however imperfectly, how EDID is or is not negotiated habitually within academic interrogation. To explore this potential, I mostly attended Summit programming bearing titles with little or no obvious focus on EDID.
To make clear my deep respect for all the work on display, I should state that nothing derogatory is intended by my failure to participate or mention any specific presentation. I readily acknowledge I was unable to be a part of several wonderful discussions. I must also admit the risks of choosing to survey workshop subject matter outside of my own areas of expertise. Where I have paused to consider additional EDID possibilities arising from a given presentation, I raise questions or seek to extrapolate on learnings received, rather than render critiques. With the practical realities of the ambitious Summit program in mind and having regard for my own experiential limitations, I ask for grace from presenters, attendees and readers in advance, even as I hope to contribute to important conversations in progress.
Physical spaces shape inclusion
The Big Thinking Summit was held at the Edmonton Convention Centre in the city core. A beautiful glass facility cascading over and built into a hillside, the building boasts a series of stairs and escalators as well as a funicular carrying registrants between the first level (Jasper Ave) and fourth level (river valley – Grierson Hill Road). The conference itself took place on the fourth and lowest level.
Traversing between levels was manageable for those without disabilities but for persons with disabilities, the experience of access to and from the venue was more challenging, especially as one of the escalators was inoperable throughout the event duration. The funicular was a good alternative, but its relative infrequency meant users needed more patience. The Summit rooms (salons) were modern and comfortable though navigating stairs rather than ramps to speaker platforms / risers had the potential to pose challenges. This became more apparent at the Gala.
ASL services were available for all plenary presentations. Closed captioning was available in some but not all workshops. Participants provided positive feedback about the salon spaces set aside for quiet reflection, prayer, ceremony and Indigenous convening.
Wordly ™ simultaneous digital translation services were recognized as helpful; the only hint of wistfulness being a desire that such services were more prominently marketed during the original period of registration promotion. Amplified messaging in this regard may have encouraged even greater numbers, engagement, and participation from Francophone Federation participants.
Overall, I noted substantial effort expended to create equitable access to the site and sessions. The observations signalling areas of opportunity for future events are modest when viewed in the larger context.
Decolonization in practice
Elders and Spiritual Advisors from Treaty 6, Jerry and Jo-Ann Saddleback accepted the gift of tobacco from the Federation President, Karine Morin at the opening plenary. Grounding the Summit in prayer, the Elders set the stage for the research and presentation offerings to come. They also served as teachers in three dedicated sessions during the event, the first of which dealt with Indigenous treaty-making practices prior to contact with Europeans. Imparted through story-telling narrative, the Saddlebacks spoke to cultural, spiritual beliefs and approaches to treaty-making with other Indigenous nations across what we call North, Central and South America. As contracting parties, the narrative provided insight into the intentions of Indigenous nations when agreeing with the Crown to establish Treaty 6, providing a contrast with western legal understandings of contract formation.
Later in the week, Cassandra Hill cast the benefits and risks of AI and digital learning from an Indigenous perspective in unexpected ways. Intercultural approaches to exploring the written culture of the Saami Indigenous people in the lands known as Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia were shared, untethered to the cultural biases of European historiography of the 18th and 19th centuries. Bobbie Racette, an Indigenous entrepreneur illuminated the biases of the tech sector with their unique experience.
In future events, I foresee additional opportunities between Indigenous scholars and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous HSS scholars and practitioners to collaborate across disciplines and expand the ambition of decolonizing research inquiry.
Sessions I Attended
Democratic Resilience
The vulnerability of democracies in times of technological and economic transformation is a preoccupying subject in contemporary public discourse and scholarly investigation. Summit presenters were similarly engrossed. At two prominent sessions, the Summit provided an excellent forum to share analysis and debate while considering possible remedial directions. Michael Wernick and Wendell Adjetey furnished gripping commentary at the Day 2 plenary. During the event gala, Malinda Smith and Stephen Toope passionately embraced the social and political dilemmas of the moment where Canada Book prize winners were also celebrated.
At the outset, audiences were challenged to recognize the current political state through an equity and class-informed lens. Today’s democracies were described as among the most unequal systems of government known in human history where the wealth gap between workers and employees relative to the owners of capital has never been greater. Part of this growing divergence may be traced to the racial capitalism of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and subsequent legal and political efforts to maintain Black socio-economic (dis)location. Running in parallel is a trajectory encompassing the dispossession of Indigenous land and the halting process of reconciliation.
At the same time, speakers acknowledged that when compared to autocracies, our open form of self-governance, however imperfect, is more durable and remains aspirational to many around the world. Within this potential, HSS scholars were identified as central to new designs for democratic resilience, ethical use of technology, promotion of human development and enhanced intercultural relations among new international partners. Processes rendering Canada’s democracy incapable of achieving a more equitable society are neither inexorable nor inevitable. What would happen if we pursued our espoused values rather than ingrained behaviours?
Returning to the matter of intercultural relations, the experience of francophone minority communities within Canada spotlights hidden potential. Peter Dorrington invited discussants, Amy Vachon-Chabot, Anne-José Villeneuve and Ibrahima Diallo to relate their insights into how such populations outside Quebec are not just surviving, but in the main, thriving. These minority communities are said to focus on long-term planning enabled by neighbourly proximity and the need to develop shared priorities in a federal environment of resource scarcity. Departing from current turns in the rest of Canada, they remain open to French-speaking newcomers and immigrants, particularly from the global south to ensure viable population growth. This is not to say the task of developing shared priorities obscures or displaces potential fractures along racial or gender lines. Nor should resilience in the face of adversity be oversimplified or romanticized. Still, the common love of language and the quest to ensure its vitality incentivizes cross-cultural negotiation. These insights fascinated the room, but limited time prevented a fulsome exploration. I image further opportunities may be allocated at upcoming events.
Even as the foregoing observations stimulated the audience, we were cautioned against complacency by the plenary and gala presenters. Democracies may inspire, but autocracies are perceived to be better at getting things done. Absent appropriate mechanisms of accountability, autocrats move the levers of power at will. Democratic processes are rigid and inefficient, incenting elected officials to focus on the short-term defined by brief parliamentary and congressional tenures. HSS scholars have the privilege of position and influence to develop comprehensive critiques and long-term solutions. These solutions must also include efficient and effective processes of implementation to ensure results are seen and felt within reasonable timelines.
To support the enhancement of influence, HSS work should be amplified. Summit speakers imagined several tactics. It starts with a recognition that policy happens within different jurisdictional boundaries, not just at the federal level. Advocacy should be pitched accordingly. Scholars should expand the number and types of channels used to platform knowledge translation. This work must be better recognized by institutions to reduce the friction of the publish or perish convention. Journals will remain a traditional means to promulgate research, but publishers would do well to lean into open-source delivery.
As a galvanizing force propelling publicly engaged research, presenters argued for EDID to be at the heart of the project, just as it was at the founding of the Federation mandate 30 years ago. EDID as a guiding element of HSS perspectives should inform research questions for all disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas and not be considered an afterthought. Finally, the Federation should continue its work on implementing the 2021 Igniting Change report Codes of Conduct should be developed for institutional leaders.
Despite broad agreement on many issues, I perceived some differences in perspective, or at least emphasis, between the speakers in their understandings of EDID histories, concepts, strategies and practices in public policy and discourse that may indicate opportunity for broader scholarly and public discussion. These differences did not detract from the generally favourable reception generated by the presenters.
Inclusive AI Futures
There were many sessions on the pressing topic of AI. I was spoiled for choice. Because of this abundance, the opening caveat in my introduction about the representativeness of the presentations I attended must be refreshed.
As though inspired, as so many are today, by the previous theme of democratic resilience, Thaddeus Wong conducted a compelling real-time experiment using AI to support his hypothesis. He asked 7 language models to quantify the proportion of users who support the redistribution of wealth from the biggest AI corporations to defend democracy. The standard response was 62% in favour. When isolated, the 7 “big tech billionaires” identified by name – Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg etc. – represented 18% support. If the big tech billionaires were removed from the standard response, 72% of users were supportive. Wong observes an apparent overrepresentation of the views of big tech and proposes to repeat the experiments daily over a period of months to assess whether the data changes in favour of the billionaires.
If so, he worries risks already associated with AI are expanding. Existing known challenges include: (1) accuracy dependent on the recency of the training data set (2) liability as the machines feed the bias of the human user to maintain and manipulate engagement; and (3) consistency in that the same bot produces different outputs when prompted with the same question from different devices at the same time. To these, Wong’s project adds a concern about subsequent inputs that alter the training data set. Towards the end of the session, they also acknowledged AI results can change based on gendered or other personas adopted by the user as part of the search prompt. The discussion also highlighted the potential to further explore and understand the systemic workings and implications of bias in these models as they relate to population diversity. Audience questions seem to suggest this is an area that has not yet been fully charted.
Greater insight into the historical development of these language models was shared at a plenary session led by moderator, Jerome Cranston and panellists Kem-Laurin Lubin, Geoffrey Martin Rockwell, Robbie Racette. Many of the training data sets were explicitly acknowledged as incomplete by their university creators at the time of delivery but were deployed by companies to create AI models with simple disclaimers. Panelists disdained these ignoble origins as “ethics-washing”.
Rockwell is an academic as is Lubin, who also self-identifies as a Black academic woman born into a Caribbean village ethos with a leadership background in the tech industry. Racette described herself as an Indigenous entrepreneur. In a sense, they placed Wong’s experiment in a larger ethical frame:
What does it take for AI tools to be trusted when there is a temptation to anthropomorphize machines?
AI has been developed by tech bros. What if AI were mothered or first conceived through community accountability?
With the AI horse already galloping past the gate, the speakers seemed seized with the immediate development of structural responses. These involve comprehensive privacy policies, visible pathways for human users to register complaints with AI corporations supported by regulatory frameworks and enforcement. Such measures could include user-centred consent mechanisms and human rights impact assessments.
Epistemological Warfare, Misinformation and Disinformation
Even as HSS scholars and practitioners expressed concern about the risks of AI, they were equally concerned with its companions: widening campaigns of misinformation and disinformation as underwritten by epistemological combat.
There was discernable agreement on working definitions. Misinformation is false, inaccurate, or misleading information spread by mistake, without any malicious intent or desire to deceive. People who share misinformation may believe the information is true. Disinformation, on the other hand, involves false information that is deliberately fabricated, manipulated, or spread with the intent to deceive, manipulate, or cause harm. Both these practices, often AI enabled, are a consequence of polarizing political dynamics often embedded within knowledge production itself.
We see misinformation and disinformation in many spheres of public discourse notably in the current debate about levels of international students. In January 2024, the IRCC placed caps on this newcomer category coinciding with a 30% decrease in Canadian polling average support for immigration overall. Hijin Park pointed to widely circulated and false narratives about international students as causing the housing crisis, increasing polarization and elevating security threat levels. They contend these deceptive tropes obscure the salience of mobility justice arguments, which expose how migration is often produced along colonial lines. In interviews with students, her work revealed their awareness of the impact of structural adjustment policies imposed by international financial institutions. These fiscal regimes compel countries of the global south to gut education spending, thereby increasing worldwide demand for education in the global north. Protected education markets therefore have the ability to escalate tuition and other costs for international students in discriminatory ways that continue the pre-independence patterns of wealth transfer from south to north. Park’s qualitative evidence also disrupts narratives about foreign student homogeneity, revealing inter-community tensions and disparate barriers. But the factors and causes permitting false accounts to gain purchase and quickly scale remain shrouded. Additional study would be of benefit to scholars and policy makers alike.
Specific misinformed and disinformed beliefs emerge from deeper and wider knowledge production contests. Scholars shared how epistemological warfare can take on several forms.
Ubaka Ogbogu exposed epistemological racism within governance practices of regenerative medicine. Global governance is currently dominated by western perspectives while regenerative medicine insights from the global south are excluded on the presumption none exist. Leading clinical trials tailored to local needs conducted in China, India and Egypt confound these normative misunderstandings. Invisibility, Ogbogu argues, is a form of epistemic injustice.
A related type of warfare persists in literacy debates. In this context however, the question of who is entitled to produce knowledge is replaced or subsumed within the larger question of whether knowledge production should admit cultural and contextual dimensions. Melanie Janzen sets the terms of the struggle. On the one hand, an early development literacy approach focuses on reading words in repetition. It is a code-focussed approach typically involving the use of phonics, owing its claim to legitimacy in cognitive science. On the other hand, a meaning-focussed approach uses pictures and sounds, not just letters, to hasten language acquisition. Contextualizing the learning objective by depicting values, beliefs and behaviours astride words and letters leverage the learner’s experience.
As between these two positions, Janzen views a code-focussed approach dimly – an enabler of ulterior and profit-oriented goals. Through standardization that removes complexity, cultural context and emotion, code-focussed approaches align with plans for privatization and corporate scale. Code-focussed approaches have also been seized by “parental rights” advocates seeking to erase diversity from learning by means of contested constitutional claims. They also cite scientific legitimacy as though a meaning-focused approach has no empirical validation. For Janzen, belonging and connection are key to language literacy. As such, the reading wars are not value-free epistemological pursuits; they are political pugilism.
Nikki Martyn applies belonging and connection beyond language and into the realm of child digital literacy by introducing the Neurorelational Love-Model to the mix. Looking to develop effective remedial approaches to misinformation and disinformation, Martyn considers neuroscience and the ethics of early development to recommend a return to emotional safety, co-regulation and relational belonging as a primary stimulus for cognitive development and a way to diminish algorithmic attachment. Put another way, “before children learn what to believe, they learn who to trust, love and connect to. Love is the experience of being seen, heard, understood and valued. When children don’t have neurologically based love and belonging, connection can be more easily displaced by algorithmic engagement.”
A question may arise however, as to how to mitigate deeper polarizing cultural inheritances within parents and communities existing before and after contact between children and technology. Racism, misogyny, antisemitism, Islamophobia, ableism, homophobia and transphobia certainly rely on AI for amplification, but they also persist independently. I wonder if familial love weakly attached to communal values of human rights, dignity, equity and inclusion offers the same promise.
Hope
Hope was a theme running through several sessions I attended. In one case it was the centrepiece. In the panel discussion, “Illuminating Hope in Higher Education” delivered by Christie Schultz, Jessica Riddell, Karine Morin, Carrie Smith, Tamara Leary and Malinda Smith, the speakers wished the concept to be more than a feeling, but rather a set of intentional practices and concrete steps. They argued HSS disciplines must continue to prioritize ethical human development and pluralism by cultivating the freedom to think critically. Higher education environments should enable constructive dissent, and resistance to simplicity. In this sense, Smith restated her views from recent work: “Hope grows where people discover that who they are and what they carry matters to the intellectual life of the institution, not despite difference but because of it. Part of cultivating hope will require us to also address where institutions inadvertently render histories, voices, and humanity invisible”1.
Higher education promotes self-actualization as well as social mobility. The data on the latter advantage remains compelling even in the post-covid era. However, there is still work to do as the panel devoted to career readiness for doctoral and postdoctoral researchers made plain. A diverse panel of SSHRC recipients charting pathways for alternative academic careers advocated for greater recognition of applications relying on community-based knowledge experience and partnerships with non-academic entities. In the recent past, there has been movement in these directions, but bias against community-engaged research and knowledge mobilization is perceived as continuing at the funder and institutional levels. This may have disproportionate impacts on scholars who self-identify as Racialized and dedicated to making qualitative and equity-based inquires within community.
As the preceding paragraph telegraphs, hope is both sustained through an ethos and built through durable structures and resourcing. Morin reminded the audience that the Big Thinking Summit was developed as an opportunity to bring the community together following the cancellation of Congress 2026. Morin also highlighted the connective tissue between SSHRC, the Federation and HSS members for which there is no equivalent in the STEM or health arenas. Thus, mechanisms exist within the HSS ecosystem to influence policy that other realms do not possess. As a further structural feature, Morin also noted that the NSERC Dimensions Program conceived in 2018 has been renewed.
A robust architecture of EDID supports creates a bridge and a levee against a rising tide of polarization and mistrust. Together, the Federation, HSS members, partners and participants may wish to further energize these structural sinews.
Conclusion and Next Steps
As recognized at the outset, this summary responds to a recommendation within the Igniting Change Report to “support and evaluate” Federation events from an EDID perspective. I offer the following conclusory observations as response to this guidance.
Overall, I noted substantial effort expended to create equitable access to the site and sessions through care in the selection and design of physical spaces and logistical execution. Any areas of opportunity identified are modest when viewed in the larger context; but such qualification and perspective should not be understood to minimize the importance of needed changes going forward.
At future events, I foresee additional opportunities between Indigenous HSS scholars and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and practitioners to collaborate across disciplines and expand the ambition of decolonizing research inquiry.
EDID considerations do not appear confined to EDID-focused research inquiries and regularly turn up at the questioning, design and analysis stages irrespective of the presentation topic. This habitual occurrence enriched the academic output on display. Sometimes, there was a sense that potential remained not fully realized. In those instances, extended exploration of EDID implications may well have deepened and challenged data synthesis.
In the spirit of inclusion as I have reflected upon the principle in the annex, additional interdisciplinary scholarship among areas well-represented at Federation events as well as areas such as law and economics that may be underrepresented are welcome. Growth in collaborations among HSS and STEM scholars holds tremendous excitement.
Despite broad agreement on many issues, I perceived some differences in perspective, or at least emphasis, between the speakers in their understandings of EDID histories, concepts, strategies and practices in public policy and discourse that may indicate opportunity for broader scholarly and public discussion. It is my hope the proposals around use of EDID concepts within the annex attached will serve as a point of departure for additional engagement within the Federation, its member associations and institutions.
But the Report recommendations speak to aspirations beyond programmatic interventions. In various ways, the document highlights the need for structural, policy, process and governance change at the institutional and systems level. Inspired by the report and deepened by community consultation, the Federation released Inflection Point earlier this year, a five-year strategic plan in which EDID evolves away from tactical and incidental forms and becomes a strategic enabler for all operative goals and objectives. As the organization expands its support of HSS scholars, EDID figures prominently in the recalibration.
Annex 1 - Use of Concepts and methodology
In this summary, I largely follow the principles2 explained in the Igniting Change Report and reflect complementarily on only three of them – equity, diversity and inclusion – from my own perspective. My goal is to enter a generative dialogue with the Report authors whose expertise is widely established and significantly renowned. I do so to reflect on the tendency in the literature beyond the report to refer to the terms in the EDID acronym interchangeably, often obscuring rather than clarifying conversation. In this section, I attempt to brighten some distinctions as I adhere to the spirt and findings of the prodigious work preceding me.
Equity
“Equity is concerned with justice and fairness”3. That is Igniting Change’s foundationally succinct statement of meaning for the term. Within the academy and the academic ecosystem, equity involves a recognition that folks arrive in spaces with relative advantages and disadvantages often because of historic and contemporary systemic dynamics of oppression and privilege. Such recognition requires proactive measures be undertaken to dismantle barriers, ensure just resource allocation, stimulate change in culture, promote fair representation and interrogate mechanisms of power and governance. In constitutional and human rights law, specific demographic groups and their intersections are acknowledged as being impacted by those historic and systemic dynamics and include but are not limited to identity-based and socially constructed categories of age, race, ethnicity, country of origin, creed, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression. Thus, the focus of equity inquiry and action centres on these self-identifiers and categories of social construction. I affirm that constitutional and human rights law are strongly related to principles of equity, especially as regards Employment Equity legislation and the legal concept of substantive equality; but the distinctions between law and principles are also important. For this summary, I refer to the principle of equity not in its form as legal compliance, but solely in its ethical form – the responsibility to insist upon fairness and justice in opportunity and experience.
Diversity
In Igniting Change, the use of the word, ‘diversity’ is considered in multiple contexts including as a social, or demographic descriptor. I will rely on this identity-based usage for this summary. In addition, while it may be implied in the Report, I think it important to expressly state that such demography includes heterosexual White (non-Racialized, non-Indigenous) men, not as a protected ground within human rights law, but as another feature of human social variance. Likewise, Indigenous peoples as members of sovereign nations are not “diverse”; yet when it comes to understanding the experiences of the original inhabitants of this land, Indigenous persons represent distinct demographic groups. Finally, linguistic difference in our national context is another source of identity-based difference. Understanding that linguistic duality and sovereign identity are given special constitutional treatment serves to affirm, rather than derogate from their demographic specificity in the EDID context. Space should also be set aside for socio-economic difference and disparity. Some consider this wide variance as conducive if not amenable to diversity of thought and experience. I am not troubled by incorporation of this perspective and am inclined to find it helpful. Diversity in this comprehensive, descriptive and demographic sense, carries no ethical content like that inescapably involved by the concept of equity.
Inclusion and Inclusive Excellence
I noted earlier that there is a temptation in public and scholarly discourse to refer to the individual words of the EDID acronym interchangeably. This may be especially the case for usages of inclusion. To further guard against this, I find it helpful to emphasize the defining feature of the concept. Inclusion means everyone. Within its ambit, there is little if any asymmetric focus on constitutionally protected populations. To do so, defeats the goal of universal engagement and responsibility. To focus on protected populations is the hard and prior work of equity to which inclusion owes a debt. Inclusive environments are free from harassment and discrimination where equity is fully realized, and sovereign interests gain meaningful expression as necessary preconditions. That is to say, human rights, equity and respect for sovereign Indigenous interests are only the prerequisites of inclusion rather than inclusion itself. I argue for an essential and starker separation between the concepts. Inclusion is made possible only after the promises of human rights, equity and meaningful decolonization are accomplished4. With these preconditions in place and with justice and fairness informing culture, inclusion becomes the ongoing practice of valuing and cultivating difference so that all can fulfil their potential and bring their whole selves in service of articulated shared goals. Further, it is what happens when “we design our educational, [research, work] and cultural spaces from the beginning so that they can be used fully by all peoples and all communities5.” Finally, standing on the bedrock of psychological safety, and propelled by universal design, intercultural competence6, humility and curiosity, inclusion is what happens when the boundaries of difference, both ontological and disciplinary, freely contest and converge in mutually immersive and dynamic relationship. In this state, ways of being and knowing are transformed. Inclusion becomes the process and inclusive excellence is the product – a natural and organically generative outcome of inclusion7. Given this imagining, where time and labour must be spent to produce socially mature conditions, inclusion emerges more often in small settings. At the population level, where such conditions are more difficult to scale, inclusion becomes the destination at the horizon of human political and economic experience. Inclusion exists as the goal, the earnestly soft-after bridge to our shared future, so rarely found in our present.
Methodology
Having decided on an approach to my EDID Summit experience, I eagerly began a three-day exercise in active listening. Of the sessions attended, I discerned several themes which I recount in this summary: (1) Physical Spaces and Logistics; (2) Decolonization; (3) Democratic Resilience; (4) Inclusive AI Futures; (5) Epistemological Warfare, Misinformation and Disinformation; and (6) Hope. As expected, there were points of connection and transition between them. I have recorded my understandings of these themes and some of the ways they take up EDID analytical opportunities in the pages that follow.