What seemed an open-and-shut case of plagiarism turned out to be symptomatic of a much more worrying issue: the runaway influence predatory publishers have on declining scholarly standards. The good news: everything is on hand to start creating the future we want. Academics should vote with their feet and move towards scholar-led diamond open access.
Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.
— Ivan Illich, 1984, Silence is a commons
During the pandemic I built a gather town co-working space for my team. The free tier enabled our team to be together even when working from home. Folks claimed their desks and co-designed the space. Multiple papers were written here and collaborations blossomed. As gather town 1.0 closes down, we say goodbye. In this post I share a few recollections and reflect on what made the gather town experience so compelling for informal co-working and flexible interactions.
When you’re enamoured of a technology and someone points out important ethical challenges, a typical reflex is to seek permission: yeah, but what about this use? If you find yourself seeking permission, one useful thing to do is to step back and inspect the underlying value conflict. What does your own moral compass say? Centering values leads to mindful choices. As you move from a tech-first to a values-first perspective, the question shifts from “won’t you give me permission?” to “how do I do the best science possible?”. And that, to me, is a question worth asking.
Some thoughts on generative AI, reproducibility, and why the praxis of slow and reproducible science provides a useful lesson for navigating the lures of “AI”.
Succinct argument for scientific publishers to adopt a clear and unequivocal policy that discourages authors from submitting synthetically generated text, and that invites them to uphold basic standards and core values of research integrity.
Jobs! If you are interested in fundamental research at the intersection of language, interaction and technology, have a look at the PhD and postdoc positions we are advertising. We look forward to growing the Futures of Language team.
TL;DR for English readers: Dutch labour unions representing university workers negotiated with UNL, representing universities’ top management levels. The latter…
For Kurzweil, singularity is the point at which machine intelligence would be more powerful than human intelligence. I’m coming to think it may be near just by the sheer amount of mindnumbing bullshit we are forced to contend with, which is making us all more stupid.
Start your blog with an exultant tone, pompous words, and gratuitous alliterations and I know we’re in for a rapid descent into the wastelands of utter mediocrity. I recently came across some obvious LLM-generated slop on science blogging aggregator Rogue Scholar. Here I write up why synthetic text has no place in scholarly blogging.
Oxford University Press is going full surveillance capitalist mode. They don’t do author offprints anymore because authors sharing their work equals “piracy”; want nothing more dearly than tracking their users’ every move; and would rather you didn’t even email your work to students and colleagues. God forbid anyone actually read your publicly funded scholarly work.
Van eind 2018 tot halverwege 2024 had ik het voorrecht om onderzoeksleider te zijn van het Vidi-project “Elementaire deeltjes van de taal” met een Vidi-talentbeurs van NWO, de Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek. Dit zijn enkele notities uit de eindrapportage.
New paper! McLean & Dingemanse 2025, A multi-methods toolkit for documentary research on ideophones. In which we review a diversity of methods and analytical approaches to the documentation of ideophones.
GPT based text generators like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot have rapidly become a “cultural sensation”. Here I provide scientific background and guidance on how to think critically and mindfully about these tools in academic writing and research.
I saw a thing fly by on PsyArxiv and could not ignore it so I’m doing a drive-by peer-review. It claims that English-based AI-generated norms are “of particular value for under-resourced languages”. Is that pesky linguistic diversity bothering you? Here, try on these rosy English-tinted glasses and everything will look all prim and proper, promise. Warning: snark detected.
It takes two to tell a story: narrator and audience. Response tokens or continuers like ‘mhmm’ play a key role in making stories work. Two new papers extend the study of continuers across languages and modalities. Work by Lutzenberger et al. reveals the importance of minimal tokens that don’t occupy the main articulators in British Sign Language and Spoken British English. And a study by Börstell showcases a neat methodological replication and extension of the sequential search method, applied to Swedish Sign Language corpus data, with promises of broader applicability.
Academics often feature a few selected papers on their home page. Typically these represent big projects or work published in prominent venues. What I’d like to see more of is “niche papers”: work to be proud of even if it has managed to remain a bit obscure. What are your niche papers?
For years now, I have responded to review requests from Elsevier journals with a friendly explanation of why I cannot in good conscience devote my free labour to their for-profit venture. I always include an out: make some work in the same journal available in open access. Somehow they always find this isn’t possible.
Lab rotations are a regular feature of work in my research groups. Students join the lab and figure out a…
You hear a word like tugɯn-dugɯn and two possible meanings ‘heartbeat’ or ‘gentle movement’. Which one do you pick? People have intuitions about the fit between forms and meanings, even for words they have never encountered. But can we explain those intuitions? And can we use that explanation to predict what people do in experimental tasks? That is the question we seek to answer in The Anatomy of Iconicity.
