The Mawu and the mountains: some historical and cartographical notes

The Mawu of present-day Akpafu relate in their oral histories that their ancestors lived in the mountains between their current location and the Volta river, in an area currently known as the Togo Plateau. Names they use for this area include Mawu kùbe (‘Mawu mountain’) and Àwubeame (‘in the Mawu mountains’). Hunters who frequented the area told me they were familiar with several ìkpakpi (historical settlements). This post is a synthesis of information from historical maps, scientific literature, oral traditions, and my own trips with Mawu community members.

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How not to use “AI” (workshop)

The mirage of “AI” reaches us through a narrative centered on inevitability, productivity, and efficiency. It is therefore at loggerheads with the values of a healthy academia, which questions narratives of inevitability, prioritizes process over product, and realizes the value of friction for creativity. This workshop is for everyone who is bored about the typical AI sales pitch and interested in how to do the best science possible and build a better academia together. The workshop promotes a values-first rather than a tech-first perspective and articulates what you probably already suspected: it is perfectly okay not to use “AI”.

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On plagiarism, predatory publishers and creating the future we want

What seemed an open-and-shut case of plagiarism turned out to be symptomatic of a much more worrying issue: the runaway influence predatory publishers have on declining scholarly standards. The good news: everything is on hand to start creating the future we want. Academics should vote with their feet and move towards scholar-led diamond open access.

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Don’t seek permission, center values

When you’re enamoured of a technology and someone points out important ethical challenges, a typical reflex is to seek permission: yeah, but what about this use? If you find yourself seeking permission, one useful thing to do is to step back and inspect the underlying value conflict. What does your own moral compass say? Centering values leads to mindful choices. As you move from a tech-first to a values-first perspective, the question shifts from “won’t you give me permission?” to “how do I do the best science possible?”. And that, to me, is a question worth asking.

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Why synthetic text is incompatible with science blogging

Start your blog with an exultant tone, pompous words, and gratuitous alliterations and I know we’re in for a rapid descent into the wastelands of utter mediocrity. I recently came across some obvious LLM-generated slop on science blogging aggregator Rogue Scholar. Here I write up why synthetic text has no place in scholarly blogging.

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Oxford University Press is going all-in on surveillance capitalism

Oxford University Press is going full surveillance capitalist mode. They don’t do author offprints anymore because authors sharing their work equals “piracy”; want nothing more dearly than tracking their users’ every move; and would rather you didn’t even email your work to students and colleagues. God forbid anyone actually read your publicly funded scholarly work.

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On “AI-generated norms” and Anglocentrism: a peer review

I saw a thing fly by on PsyArxiv and could not ignore it so I’m doing a drive-by peer-review. It claims that English-based AI-generated norms are “of particular value for under-resourced languages”. Is that pesky linguistic diversity bothering you? Here, try on these rosy English-tinted glasses and everything will look all prim and proper, promise. Warning: snark detected.

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In praise of niche papers

Academics often feature a few selected papers on their home page. Typically these represent big projects or work published in prominent venues. What I’d like to see more of is “niche papers”: work to be proud of even if it has managed to remain a bit obscure. What are your niche papers?

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Tying ourselves into knots about reasoning

Knots are fascinating: they tie together topology, embodied experience, and material culture. Here I discuss a paper about knots and intuitive reasoning in Open Mind. The paper ties itself into knots about intuitive physics, but pulling at some of the threads, it turns out it’s actually more like a Trojan horse for 4E cognition.

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Find your own voice: against LLM slop in academic writing

Writing is thinking. The writing process is the most neglected part of our job. We spend millions on fancy equipment and uncountable hours on training for using this or that toolkit. Yet we assume the BA-level academic writing course we once followed is sufficient; the rest we’ll just learn on the job and hopefully soon we’ll automate away with LLMs. It is all formulaic anyway. To think this way is to hollow out the very foundations of scholarly work. Can’t think original thoughts if you don’t find your own voice.

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Scholarly blogging, now with DOIs

I have been blogging at The Ideophone since 2007, and not all of it has been as ephemeral as my PhD promotor once feared. Over the past week I have worked with Rogue Scholar to archive selected content from The Ideophone and make it more durably accessible. This posts documents the process and some of the choices made.

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Language between animals and computers

Language makes us human. But there is an interesting asymmetry in our willingness to ascribe linguistic capacities to non-humans: animals are seen as having none, whereas computers may well master it according to many. What curious conception of language makes this asymmetry possible? And what do Descartes and Turing have to do with it? Notes from a new essay about language between animals and computers.

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How should descriptive grammars cover interjections?

Interjections are, in Felix Ameka’s memorable formulation, “the universal yet neglected part of speech” (1992). They are rarely the subject of historical, typological or comparative research in linguistics, and they are notably underrepresented in descriptive grammars. As grammars are the main source of data for typologists, this is of course a perfect example of a self-reinforcing feedback loop. How can we break this trend?

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Sawing off the branch you’re sitting on

There is a minor industry in speech science and NLP devoted to detecting and removing disfluencies. In some of our recent work we’re showing this adversely impacts voice user interfaces. Here I review a case where the hemming and hawing is the point — and where removing it adversely impacts our ability to make sense of what people do in interaction.

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How to avoid all-male panels (manels)

The last time I blindly accepted an invitation to speak was in 2012, when I was invited to an exclusive round table on the future of linguistics. As a fresh postdoc I was honoured and bedazzled. When the programme was circulated, I got a friendly email from a colleague asking me how I’d ended up there, and whether I thought the future of linguistics was to be all male. Turns out the round table was exclusive in more than one sense.

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