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Automating Language, Losing Relationality: Feminist Reflections on African Language AI
A grandmother pauses before answering a child. The meaning of her words lies not only in the words themselves, but in tone, shared history, the relationship between speaker and listener, the setting, and even the silence that precedes the response. None of these become part of the training data for today’s large language models (LLMs). (more…) (read more...)
The Hotspot as a Sociotechnical and Political Object: Frontline Healthcare Professionals and Public Conversation alongside the Intensification of a U.S. Measles Outbreak
John Snow’s 19th century dot-map (from the series introduction) is representative of a shift in the public management of infectious diseases towards measuring density of confirmed cases within a geographic region. This practice is referred to in epidemiology as spatial clustering and as “hotspots” more colloquially. Today’s outbreak investigations use visual representations of disease spread as a standard practice. Johns Hopkins’ COVID-19 tracker was one such communicative tool for showing the intensification of an outbreak across space and time. The visual becomes representative of a more than normal number of confirmed cases in spatial and temporal balance, to allow the viewer to identify what we reference as hotspots. In what follows, I will examine the utility of the term hotspots through an investigation into the public discussion of the current United States measles outbreaks (2024—) put in contrast with the localized practice of frontline healthcare professionals in South Florida. I (read more...)
Stuck Among the Trees
This article is a part of a series about stuckness in science and technology. Read the introduction to the series here. On a sunny day in November 2021, I was taking a walk with two forest scientists, Junho and Minho (pseudonyms). Junho was then working as a junior researcher at a premier research institution in South Korea, whereas Minho was a Ph.D. candidate at a university lab. During my fieldwork with forest scientists from 2017 to 2023, I frequently encountered growing expectations that new field technologies—drones, high-resolution satellite sensors, or LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) devices—would replace some of the traditional fieldwork components that depended on diameter tapes, calipers, hypsometers, or increment coring. For many younger scientists, these field techniques were considered notoriously time-consuming, toilsome, and costly. While many of my interlocutors called such expectations a “hype,” Junho and Minho, as technophiles both in their early 30s, were excited about (read more...)