Disrupting Digital Monolingualism: A report on multilingualism in digital theory and practice

This report is about the Disrupting Digital Monolingualism virtual workshop in June 2020. The DDM workshop sought to draw together a wide range of stakeholders active in confronting the current language bias in most of the digital platforms, tools, algorithms, methods, and datasets which we use in our study or practice, and to reverse the powerful impact this bias has on geocultural knowledge dynamics in the wider world. The workshop aimed to describe the state of the art across different academic disciplines and professional fields, and foster collaboration across diverse perspectives around four points of focus: Linguistic and geocultural diversity in digital knowledge infrastructures; Working with multilingual methods and data; Transcultural and translingual approaches to digital study; and Artificial intelligence, machine learning and NLP in language worlds.

Event website https://languageacts.org/digital-mediations/event/disrupting-digital...

This report forms part of a series of reports produced by the Digital Mediations strand of the Language Acts & Worldmaking project, in this case in collaboration with the translingual strand of the Cross-Language Dynamics project (based at the Institute of Modern Languages Research), both funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Open World Research Initiative. Digital Mediations explores interactions and tensions between digital culture, multilingualism and language fields including the Modern Languages.

Written by Paul Spence with input from workshop collaborators and participants.
Layout and design by Renata Brandão.
Photo by Ryutaro Uozumi on Unsplash.