Historic machines from 'prams' to 'Parliament': new avenues for collaborative linguistic research

Mia Ridge, Giorgia Tolfo, Barbara McGillivray, Kalle Westerling, Nilo Pedrazzini

Research output: Contribution to conference typesAbstractpeer-review

Abstract

Research in computational linguistics has made successful attempts at modelling word meaning at scale, but much remains to be done to put these computational models to the test of historical scholarship (see e.g. Beelen et al. 2021). More importantly, a lot of computational research looks at texts in a historical vacuum, 'synchronically', as linguists would say. Living with Machines is an interdisciplinary research project that rethinks the impact of technology on the lives of ordinary people during the Industrial Revolution (Ahnert et al. 2021). During this project, we decided to address a fundamental question: what did people mean by ‘machine’ and how has this meaning changed over time?

This paper outlines how a simple research question like 'what was a machine?' can provide an opportunity to engage the public with our work while also generating data for analysis and new avenues of research in a radically collaborative way.
Original languageEnglish
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 24 May 2022
EventDigital Humanities Benelux 2022 - University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Duration: 1 Jun 20223 Jun 2022
https://2022.dhbenelux.org/

Conference

ConferenceDigital Humanities Benelux 2022
Abbreviated titleDH Benelux 2022
Country/TerritoryLuxembourg
CityLuxembourg
Period1/06/20223/06/2022
Internet address

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Historic machines from 'prams' to 'Parliament': new avenues for collaborative linguistic research'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this