16 The Linguist Vol/59 No/6 2020
thelinguist.uberflip.com
FEATURES
research project, and communicating their findings in
writing and through podcasts, which we will share soon.
They were introduced to digital humanities
methodologies that open up languages research by
providing the means to gather information around the
use of the terms 'coronavirus' and 'Covid-19'. They used
their language skills to broaden the searches of key
words and were trained in Voyant Tools to engage in a
practical distance-reading approach to identify large-
scale trends. In this way, we have begun to see how the
movement of the virus across the globe has meant the
emergence of languages that locate narrations in
relation to geopolitical interests, to histories of empire
and to a complex questioning of the idea of the global.
Disrupting digital monolingualism
Also in the context of the pandemic, we have had to
consider how we engage with our co-researchers and
practitioners. Our Digital Mediations strand led the way
with a two-day online workshop, 'Disrupting Digital
Monolingualism', which explored the challenges of
multilingualism in digital practice. There is a recognised
bias towards firstly English and then European languages.
The workshop brought together leading researchers,
educators, digital practitioners, language-focused
professionals, policy makers and other interested
parties to address the challenges of multilingualism
in digital spaces and to propose new models and
solutions. The goal was to combine theory and practice
to explore a key question: how do languages,
translation, and translingual and transcultural dynamics
disrupt the predominantly monolingual, and particularly
anglophone, model on which digital culture and
technology are based?
The event involved various synchronous and
asynchronous interventions. The synchronous component
was attended by 300 users from all over the world, and
about 230 watched it on YouTube relay. The
asynchronous component invited 41 researchers from
16 countries to address multilingual challenges for
knowledge infrastructures, transcultural approaches to
digital study, artificial intelligence, machine learning,
neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) in language worlds,
and the challenges in working with multilingual data. We
expect the workshop to contribute to new partnerships
focused on multilingualism and geo-cultural diversity.
These questions of monolingualism and multilingualism,
and the approach of combining research and practice,
are shared across all the research strands. The study of
language in its worldmaking force informs our conceptual
understanding of the ways that languages act in the
world. This in turn informs our practice and our activism
in creating communities of co-researchers who promise
the transformative impact with which we were tasked by
the Open World Research Initiative. We will continue our
work in the series of books we are launching in 2021 with
Hachette UK/John Murray Learning, and as part of the
Arts and Humanities Research Institute at King's College,
as the Centre for Language Acts and Worldmaking.
Note
1 For information about the four funded projects see
https://ahrc.ukri.org/research/fundedthemesand
programmes/themes/owri
COVID SLANG
Language around the
pandemic includes the
German Hamsterkäufe
for people hoarding
goods (top) and
'covidiot' for those
behaving without due
care, such as by
wearing a face mask
incorrectly (above)
IMAGES
©
SHUTTERSTOCK
