This course explores the intersection of language, technology and the internet. We start by looking at the introduction of writing and how it can be represented on computers. We then look at speech and how it differs from text. These are compared to different media of communication such as email, blogs and chat. The internet has made new methods of writing possible, as well as made access to an incredible variety and amount of text. We study how wikipedia pages are written, and students group together to write their own pages. In the second half of the course, we learn about how information is represented electronically, both as text and meta-text. We finish with a discussion of large language models and AI. The implications of this technology for our thinking and understanding of language will also be discussed.
This course is created by Francis Bond.
Lecture notes and materials are licensed under CC-BY-4.0
Each Year I need to
- redo the course outline on the index page
- timetable, location and times
- redo the slides (change headx, recompile: do.bash)
- link to the local course management system (CMS)
- update the wikipage
- create a wiki dashboard
- make sure the assignments are all up
- tag github with the year
- possibly update assignment 3