Making Sense of the World through Language and Stories: A Digital Humanities Perspective
The AI boom has put language into the spotlight like never before. While linguistics is the scientific study of language, language has always been a topic that everyone has a view on simply because of its ubiquity1. The latest ‘tech’ angle adds another dimension to popular attitudes and practices. There is naïve adoption of AI tools, lack of linguistic knowledge, and increasing amounts of AI slop across various channels.
In this new world, digital humanities research needs to step up its efforts. It has to complement the development of digital methods with theoretical foundations for a big picture view of language. People use language to act, to do things and to interact with one another. Language is what makes us human. It is used to tell the stories and create the narratives that shape our society, our culture and our reality.
In my talk, I will propose the beginnings of a digital humanities approach that aims to widen the perspective on the study of language both to refine digital research methods and to connect to popular linguistic attitudes.
1 Cameron, D. (1995). Verbal Hygiene. The Politics of Language. Routledge.
This lecture will also be live streamed via Zoom. You are welcome to join us either in South Hall or online.
For online participants
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Speaker
Michaela Mahlberg
Michaela Mahlberg is a professor of digital humanities and Alexander-von-Humboldt Professor at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, and an honorary professor of corpus linguistics at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is also the editor of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, the president of the international Dickens Society, and the host of the Life and Language podcast. With her team, she has developed the CLiC web app for the digital reading of fiction.
As a corpus linguist, she is interested in language as a social phenomenon and the way in which we use language to understand and shape the world we live in. A large part of her research focuses on the language of Dickens’s fiction, literary linguistics, and discourse analysis.
Mahlberg studied English and mathematics at the University of Bonn and the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. She completed a doctorate in English linguistics at Saarland University in Saarbrücken. She previously taught English linguistics at the University of Bari Aldo Moro (Italy), Liverpool Hope University (UK), the University of Liverpool (UK) and the University of Nottingham (UK).
Contact
If you have questions about this event, please contact Kimmy Fox.
