I am extremely happy to announce that NWO will be funding the project Futures of Language over the next five years. We will start in September 2024; stay tuned for news about positions for postdocs, PhDs, and research software engineers.
Tell me in 20 words: We study artisanal and artificial ways of languaging to better understand language + technology, and to reimagine our linguistic futures.
Make it 99 words: Language is possibly humanity’s greatest invention, and likely the most adaptable. This project studies language as it adapts to major sociotechnical transitions. We start from the global linguistic diversity that represents humanity’s many parallel presents and futures: a possibility space of artisanal language technologies. We investigate how interactive interfaces exploit this substrate, some of them slick and coercive, others more rigid and clunky: the future is now, and it is in need of fundamental scrutiny. And we theorize and imagine futures of convivial language technology in which human agency and linguistic diversity are not curbed, but preserved and enhanced.
“I want Greek; I want Chaucer; I want Esperanto. I want the Zulu clicks; I want modes of expression as yet unused, though we must not say undreamt of.” — Victoria Welby, Significs & Language, 1911
“At present we tend to define human needs in terms of abstract goals and treat these as problems to which technocrats can apply escalating solutions. What we need is rational research on the dimensions within which technology can be used by concrete communities.” — Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 1973
“decisions made by the general public about emergent technologies depend much more on what that public attributes to such technologies than on what they actually are or can and cannot do” — Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976
“As soon as computational interfaces display some intelligence … we are inclined to endow them with the rest.” —Lucy Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations, 2007[1987]