Mining Your Language - with Dr Rachael Tatman

Selfie Reflective

Dr Rachael Tatman has a PHD in linguistics, and is a Senior Development Advocate at Rasa ~

Today, I’ve been awake for a total of one hour. My phone tells me I’ve already picked it up and opened it 25 times. I’ve received 16 notifications, and most of these are messages from friends, family members or professional connections. The sheer volume of communication that we receive and send via our smartphones and social media platforms is - in a word - insane!

As everyday scrollers, what we don't often interrogate are what all of our communications are equating to. Who, or what technology, might be lurking in the background of our DM's? Why are they interested in interrogating our style and use of language and words? What is being deduced about our identities? How are our messages and posts being researched, assessed, influenced - and leveraged?

Today, we’re speaking to Dr Rachael Tatman, a Senior Development Advocate at Rasa. Rasa is a company that makes an open source framework for building conversational assistants (think chat-bots or Siri). Having completed a PHD in linguistics in 2017, Rachael brings a really interesting, critical and ethical lens to this work. Her research focussed on computational sociolinguistics - or, how our social identity affects the way we use language in computational contexts - which is hugely applicable to the work she does today.

In this episode, Rachel chats to us about what kind of data is being used from the communications we publish and send online. She discusses elements of her work and research. She talks about how to respect data if you are someone who works with it, and - you'll be stoked to know - we also discuss the significance of emojis 🍎

Topics include: privacy, what is unique to online communication, ethical data use, emojis - and even GIF's!

Shownotes:

Find out more about Rachael's work and projects by visiting her website and following her on Twitter.

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