LING150C1

Language is increasingly being produced and interpreted by machines and this fact ripples through humans' lives in an increasing variety of linguistic interactions. This course asks students to explore the applications of linguistic analysis to the problems posed and opportunities created by the creation and dissemination of language in the digital world. Students will learn about computational (corpus-based, machine-learning) and analytic (linguistic and anthropological) approaches to the production and understanding of language, and the ways these may interact to magnify or diminish problematic properties of public speech, and reveal or conceal its authorship, especially in the digital world. In collaboration with the WikiEducation initiative, students will actively engage in the critical review of Wikipedia resources to assist in the identification and remediation of problematic language.