Maite Taboada

Toward Automated Discourse Network Analysis

Discourse Network Analysis has long been capped by the price of expert judgment. Here is a design for automating it at corpus scale without surrendering command of meaning — and FineStructure, the open-source workbench I am building for it.

On Language and Humanity: In Conversation With Noam Chomsky

The father of modern linguistics is still opening up new kinds of questions and topics for inquiry.

The Universal Rules of Civilized Discourse

With Discourse, it was clear that we needed to totally reboot the software to create next-generation forum software. But code is only part of the story. Any reasonable attempt at delivering a Civilized Discourse Construction Kit has to provide a safe, simple default set of guidelines for civilized discourse.

Computation and its Connotations

A Review of Language Machines by Leif Weatherby

The Discourse Encouragement Fund

News about about the next-generation open source Discourse forum software.

Reflexive discourse analysis: A methodology for the practice of reflexivity

How to implement reflexivity in practice? Can the knowledge we produce be emancipatory when our discourses recursively originate in the world we aim to challenge? Critical International Relations (IR) scholars have successfully put reflexivity on the agenda based on the theoretical premise that discourse and knowledge play a socio-political role. However, academics often find themselves at a loss when it comes to implementing reflexivity due to the lack of adapted methodological and pedagogical material. This article shifts reflexivity from meta-reflections on the situatedness of research into a distinctive practice of research and writing that can be learned and taught alongside other research practices. To do so, I develop a methodology based on discourse: reflexive discourse analysis (RDA). Based on the discourse analysis of our own discourse and self-resocialisation, RDA aims to reflexively assess and transform our socio-discursive engagement with the world, so as to render it consistent with our intentional socio-political objectives. RDA builds upon a theoretical framework integrating discourse theory to Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus for reflexivity and practices illustrated in the works of Comte and La Boétie. To illustrate this methodology, I used this very article as a recursive performance. I show how RDA enabled me to identify implicit discriminative mechanisms within my discourse and transform them into an alternative based on love, to produce an article more in line with my socio-political objectives. Overall, this article turns reflexivity into a critical methodology for social change and demonstrates how to integrate criticality methodologically into research and writing.

lexicon

Word clouds and lexicon-tagged views of someone's prose.

Probabilistic dynamic semantics

We introduce the framework of Probabilistic Dynamic Semantics (PDS), which we use to seamlessly integrate dynamic semantic analyses of lexical and discourse phenomena in the Montagovian tradition with

We Have Always Been Action TheoristsToward a Critical Theory of Language for the Era of “Large Language Models”

Scholars of literature and culture understandably place themselves among the world’s premiere experts on matters of language. But they also know that fields like linguistics and communication have their own ways of studying how people express themselves through speech and written media. A key difference concerns the theories and methodologies...

Thinking modes

Floating in linguistic space.

Getting started - Docs

Discourse Graphs are a tool and ecosystem for collaborative knowledge synthesis, enabling researchers to map ideas and arguments in a modular, composable graph format.

Contra Literacy-Laundering: Mechanistic Critical AI Literacy

Critical discourse on large language models (LLMs) has bifurcated between epistemic dismissal that invokes some form of the stochastic parrot metaphor to puncture hype, and pragmatic accommodation that treats LLM capability improvements as grounds for updating the critique. We argue that both misdiagnose the problem as the issue is not whether or not LLMs work, but what kind of working is happening and at whose cost. Drawing on meta-theoretical frameworks of cognitive science, feminist labor analysis and critical pedagogy, we propose a conceptual reorientation. We develop this claim through registers of (i) the cognitive, examining what is forfeited when statistical pattern-matching substitutes for the iterative, grounded processes that constitute thinking; (ii) the pedagogical, examining how “AI literacy” as currently deployed is itself a symptom of the confusion it purports to address; and (iii) the political, examining how the infrastructure framing of AI naturalizes asymmetric labor displacement, particularly of feminized cognitive and reproductive work. The stochastic parrot, deployed with mechanistic precision rather than mere rhetorical convenience, specifies what is forfeited when cognitive labor is delegated, who bears the cost, and why a literacy adequate to this moment must begin from the epistemology of those most harmed by the systems it describes. We conclude with underlining that critical AI literacy, which this paper embodies an instance of, is the only sensible way forward.