Alphabets and AI
Description
This seminar investigates the entangled histories, present tensions, and speculative futures of alphabets and artificial intelligence. From the symbolic foundations of written language to the algorithmic architectures that drive machine learning, alphabets and AI share a deep conceptual affinity: both transform the world through systems of encoded signification. This seminar invites scholars to explore how alphabetic writing systems intersect with AI in literary, linguistic, philosophical, and cultural contexts. While the seminar foregrounds “alphabets” as a conceptual anchor, we use the term capaciously to include other graphemic systems such as syllabaries (e.g., Japanese kana), abjads (e.g., Arabic), abugidas (e.g., Devanagari), logographies (e.g., Chinese characters), and hybrid or constructed scripts. We welcome discussions that critically examine how such diverse orthographic traditions are represented, distorted, or erased in AI training corpora and natural language processing pipelines.
How do different writing systems—alphabetic, syllabic, logographic—shape the ways AI parses and produces language? How does the history of alphabetization influence the design of large language models and their biases? What might comparative philology, paleography, or typographic history contribute to current debates in AI ethics, cognition, and aesthetics?
Comparative projects that examine AI across multiple scripts, languages, or media are especially encouraged, including work that bridges Europhone and non-Europhone contexts or explores scriptural plurality in multilingual corpora. We are particularly interested in proposals that approach the topic from a comparative, translingual, or transmedial perspective. Possible areas of focus include:
- The algorithmic politics of OCR and NLP across different scripts
- Alphabetic dominance in digital language infrastructures
- AI-generated literature and the limits of orthographic creativity
- Indigenous, non-Latin, or endangered scripts in AI contexts
- Semiotic theory and machine reading
- The aesthetics of AI-generated typography or handwriting
- The role of alphabetization in dataset curation and linguistic hierarchies
- AI and translation/transcription
- AI and theories of value
- The ethics and politics of translation in the age of LLMs
- The critical discussion of LLMs' ontologies
- The future of translation studies in the context of the growing use of LLMs
We welcome papers from literary studies, media theory, linguistics, digital humanities, history of writing, AI ethics, and related fields. This seminar aims to bring together scholars working at the intersection of historical textual practices and emerging computational paradigms, opening new avenues for comparative literature in the age of artificial intelligence.
This seminar has been merged with another titled “The Politics and Ethics of Translation in the Age of Large Language Models,” expanding the discussion to include the long history of machine translation and the role of translation as mediation between languages, cultures, and knowledge. Together, the merged seminar explores how large language models revive early dreams of a universal language while reinscribing hierarchies of linguistic and cultural power, inviting dialogue across literary studies, translation theory, media theory, and philosophy. In addition to the listed co-organizers, this seminar has also been organized by Alwin Franke.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Christopher D. Jimenez is Associate Professor of English at Stetson University. His research examines catastrophe in twentieth- and twenty-first-century global Anglophone literature, with interests in ecocriticism, nuclear criticism, biopolitics, and the sociology of literature. His work in the digital humanities focuses on the aesthetics of digital typography, the algorithmic politics of machine learning, and the computational dimensions of alphabets & technical standards such as Unicode.
Speaker Bio
Daniel Persia is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. His research takes shape at the intersection of Translation Studies, Black Studies, and Latin American Studies, where he finds new ground for thinking about subjectivity, race and technology in the twenty-first century. He is also a published translator of Latin American poetry, Afro-Brazilian fiction, European art history, and critical thought from the Global South.
Speaker Bio
Avery Slater is associate professor of English at the University of Toronto and research lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (SRI). Her work on AI and the humanities has appeared in Critical Inquiry, Poetics Today, IEEE, Philosophy Today, Modern Philology, The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI, and elsewhere. She serves as president of the MLA’s Executive Forum for the Digital Humanities.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Katia Schwerzmann is a philosopher of media and technology, focusing on the intersections of body, politics, and technology. She is an associate researcher at KWI (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen, Germany) and SFB Virtuelle Lebenswelten (Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany). Her work has appeared in AI & Society, Philosophy & Technology, Social Text, Big Data & Society, Appareil, and Revue des sciences humaines. Her first book, Theorie des graphischen Feldes, was published by Diaphanes in 2020.
Speaker Bio
William Tilleczek is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Political Science at the Université de Montréal. He holds a PhD in Government from Harvard University. His recent works have appeared in Theory and Event, The Journal of the Philosophy of History, Foucault Studies, and Global Labour Journal. He is the 2024 recipient of the Leo Strauss Award of the American Political Science Association. As a translator, Will has worked on Simone Weil and Isidore of Pelusium.
Speaker Bio
Alwin Franke is assistant professor of German at Stetson University. He specializes in German and global modernisms, world literature, and materialist literary and media theory.
Speaker Bio
Lucas Bang is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College whose scholarship bridges programming-language theory, formal methods, and interdisciplinary art. His work spans symbolic reasoning about programs to interactive installations and critical computing projects that explore the cultural life of code. Drawing on computer science, media theory, and the arts, he investigates how programming languages function both as rigorous formal systems and as creative, symbolic media.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Travis M. Bartley is a PhD candidate at the City University of New York, Graduate Center's English department and deep learning engineer at the NVIDIA corporation. His research examines multilingualism and dialectalism in modern speech technologies, focusing on the relationship between speech recognition, formal language theory, and their relationship with heteroglossia in human language use. His work has been published in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series, ACL, ICASSP, and ICLR,
Speaker Bio
Sean Yeager is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. Their visualizations of time in narrative won the Fourtier Prize at the 2019 Digital Humanities Conference. Their research on autistic reading practices received honorable mention for the Nadal Prize at the 2022 International Conference on Narrative. Their theorization of autistic temporalities received honorable mention for the Bruns Prize at the 2024 meeting of the Society for Literature, Arts, and the Sciences.
Speaker Bio
Jana Hecktor is working at the IZEW (Tübingen). She is a Media Scholar and her PhD focuses on prediction processes done by so called AI-systems. From a philosophical perspective she addresses the changes that occur when prediction processes are carried out by and with machine learning systems. An important aspect of this is the influence that technical systems have for the society in general as well as the individual.
Lisa Koeritz works in an interdisciplinary research project at the IZEW researching the challenge of integrating ethical aspects in the technical development with and of AI systems. Previously, she studied Computer Science and Data Engineering in Berlin and Potsdam and worked as a data scientist in industry and policy.