XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

473

Algorithm and Language

RC25 Language and Society (host committee)

Language: English

The use of algorithms for the analysis of large amounts of data to achieve outcomes in research has grown tremendously in the last decade. This use of algorithms yields research outcomes that reflect the algorithm’s logic or the logic of the people who produced the algorithms. Those outcomes generate knowledge and build reality. Thus algorithms are becoming a more inherent component of the society in which we live. These algorithms themselves should and have become objects of inquiry in social science research. The patterns generated by algorithms may likely tell us more about the algorithms, the people who produced the algorithms and the power disparities that represents, than what they tell us about the social world. How has the use of algorithms in research affected the narratives of quantitative research about the social world? How has the use of algorithms in society, in general, transformed socio-linguistic research, especially in relationship “to the context in which the language data was produced” (van Hout 2005)? What is the role of socio-linguistics in the analysis of algorithms, if any?