Linguistics The downside of digitalisation
People dealing with written text have been working digitally for a long time. Increasingly, they must address the negative aspects of texts online.
If digitalisation continues at the current rate, my research is unlikely to be affected. After all, almost all contemporary texts have long been available digitally – or when did you last write something by hand? In linguistics, computers have been used to analyse and process language data for over 50 years. You are reading this article digitally, as well – the entire world wide web is composed of digital text.
At the same time, the practical importance of digital linguistics has increased significantly due to digitalisation. One example is its application to negative communication practices such as manipulation and misinformation, hate speech, plagiarism and so on. Digital forensic linguistics develops methods based on artificial intelligence, in order to uncover linguistic characteristics of, for example, disinformation and abuse in the plethora of digital texts that are created every day.