Disrupting Digital Monolingualism (event recordings)

Disrupting Digital Monolingualism workshop, a one-and-a-half day event, was held online on June 16th and 17th 2020. The workshop was hosted by the Language Acts & Worldmaking project with the support of the Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community project, both projects funded by the AHRC as part of its Open World Research Initiative.

Description

The core themes of the workshop were:

• Linguistic and geocultural diversity in digital knowledge infrastructures
• Working with multilingual data
• Transcultural and translingual approaches to digital study
• Artificial intelligence, machine learning and NLP in language worlds

This workshop had these goals:

• To map the current state of multilingualism in digital theory and practice through, and across, languages and cultures
• To identify areas of linguistic (especially Anglophone) bias and ‘language indifference’ in digital methodologies and infrastructure
• To discuss the value and role of languages in digital theory and practice and their implications for language study and professions
• To bring together experts in languages-driven digital study and practice to discuss priorities for future action and potential collaboration
• To explore emerging models for linguistic diversity and languages-aware digital practice in academia, education and private/third sectors and to document best practice

View the workshop Programme. Read about the Theme Groups which have continued work on topics which emerged at the workshop.

View workshop presentation videos below.

Introductions

Paul Spence (en)

Paul Spence (es)

Renata Brandao (pt)

Naomi Wells (en)

Panel

Anasuya Sengupta - Whose Knowledge? Decolonising the Internet's Languages... and questions of epistemic (in)justice

Eduard Arriaga - University of Indianapolis. Language and Technology Decolonization as a Disruption to Digital Monolingualism

Cosima Wagner - Freie Universität Berlin. Towards multilingually enabled digital knowledge infrastructures

Lightning talks

Andiswa Bukula - South African Centre for Digital Language Resources. Multilingualism in the South African context

Sarah McMonagle - University of Hamburg. Which (mis)perceptions matter in minority language media research? Reflections on/from an enquiry of digital language practices among Sorbian adolescents

Pascal Belouin and Sean Wang - Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. RISE and SHINE: An API-based Infrastructure for Multilingual Textual Resources

Michael Castelle - University of Warwick. Multilingual Transformers: Linguistic Relativity for the 21st Century

Ernesto Priani Saisó - Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Challenges of not using English as the dominant language in DH international projects

Carlos Yebra Lopez - New York University. How to Use Digital-Homelands in order to Revitalise Diasporic Languages

Isabelle Zaugg - Columbia University's Data Science Institute. Let's Talk About Scripts

Pedro Nilsson-Fernàndez - University College Cork, Ireland. Digital Peripheries: A Postcolonial Digital Humanities Approach to Catalan 20th Century Literary Spaces

Cosima Wagner - Freie Universität Berlin. Challenging research infrastructures from a multilingual DH point of view - a short overview

Demo

Caoimhín Ó Dónaill - Ulster University. CLILSTORE: An open online platform for multimedia language learning