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dingemansemark.bsky.social
Mark Dingemanse
@dingemansemark.bsky.social
2.8K followers 440 following 4.2K posts
Language, interaction, tech • Here with doubts about the next monetizable monopoly... • papers https://markdingemanse.net • blog https://ideophone.org • fedi https://scholar.social/@dingemansemark/ • POSSE: Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere
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dingemansemark.bsky.social
Mark Dingemanse @dingemansemark.bsky.social · Oct 18
Welcome new followers! You may find me posting about linguistics, language technology, "AI", open research, epistemic injustice, home computing, and whatever captures my fancy. I blog at ideophone.org (since 2007) and my academic site —with PDFs of papers etc.— is markdingemanse.net
dingemansemark.bsky.social
"The risk is not making AI conscious, but making humans zombies, parasitized by fake realities with real consequences" 🔥

Bekker & Ciaunica popping the hype bubble and reasserting the value of care for living beings
annaciaunica.bsky.social Anna Ciaunica @annaciaunica.bsky.social · 1d
Sneak peak from our paper led by amazing Erik Bekker ! 👇🏼

arxiv.org/abs/2601.21016
February 8, 2026 at 8:08 AM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
It seems @oxfordunipress.bsky.social no longer cares about bibliographic metadata. The way they do their handbooks these days is they rob all individual chapters of bibliographies, meaning cites go undetected and the crossref metadata for chapters is the biggest mess possible

1/n
February 7, 2026 at 11:37 PM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
Some soothing music for the weekend. Chris Thile, Bach Partita 2 in Dm, Sarabande (BWV 1004) skipvids.com?v=Q5yQCo4n2DU
Chris Thile - Bach: Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004: III. Sarabanda (Live) - SkipVids
ChrisThile: Chris Thile - Bach: Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004: III. Sarabanda (Live) - https://SkipVids.com
skipvids.com
February 7, 2026 at 8:20 PM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
ERB is always a delight in both content and form. Love stumbling across typographical easter eggs like the paradoxical 𝒫 here

Also issue 10 comes with a gorgeous celebratory bookmark & page ripper

#EuropeanReviewOfBooks @europeanreview.bsky.social
Paragraph of text with the word paradoxical in focus. It starts with a special p, unlike other words, like place, in the same paragraph, indicating it must be a deliberate choice of the typographer Bookmark and page ripper in one on sunlit-strewn page 53 of issue 10 of the ERB
February 7, 2026 at 3:57 PM
Reposted by Mark Dingemanse
devezer.bsky.social
Please do not let all the focus on the funding environment in academia distract us from the real victims of these crimes and their enablers. Please do not look away from the misogyny. Please notice the gender differential. Please pay attention to how women are talked about in these emails.
devezer.bsky.social Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 8d
While it may explain some of the context, this framing also hides that women scientists didn't cozy up to epstein the way men did. They also need funding, no? This is also about being part of a powerful boys club where one can act in despicable ways with impunity. Misogyny is a huge driving factor.
February 1, 2026 at 4:15 PM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
Ursula Le Guin wrote: "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words."

New on words & beginnings:
January 31, 2026 at 6:40 AM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
"Every spectacle has a hidden operator" — @samiraibnelkaid.bsky.social shares a key visual from the Futures of Language living library markdingemanse.net/futures/news... #futures #technology

If LinkedIn is your thing, you can also follow these posts here: www.linkedin.com/company/futu...
Scene of a magical lantern. On the right a rapt audience looking at a projected image. On the left, hidden from the audience behind the projection canvas, a person operating the magical lantern. Caption: H. Valentin, "Une Scène de fantasmagorie, d'aprés Morea' (1848)
January 29, 2026 at 4:11 PM
Reposted by Mark Dingemanse
olivia.science
Some tools for thinking about AI in a time when the companies making them are trying to destroy teaching and learning itself...

1/n 🧵
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Dec 2
First off we pluralise L to accentuate there's no 1 approach. And we position ourselves in this interdisciplinary field of critically examining AI & reflecting on harms.

We give 5 non-exhaustive angles: conceptual clarity, critical thinking, decoloniality, respecting expertise, slow science.

2/
Figure 1: The important dimensions of CAILs across research and education; clockwise from 12 o’clock: Con- ceptual Clarity is the idea that terms should refer. Critical Thinking is deep engagement with the relationships between statements about the world. Decoloniality is the process of de-centring and addressing dominant harmful views and practices. Respecting Expertise is the epistemic compact between professionals and society. Slow Science is a disposition towards preferring psychologically, techno-socially, and epistemically healthy practices. The lines between dimensions represent how they are interwoven both directly and indirectly.
January 27, 2026 at 6:03 AM
Reposted by Mark Dingemanse
wimpouw.bsky.social
#cognitivescience Don't forget our pledge to publish one article in a scholar-led diamond open access journal in five years is still live. Were half way through! After another 250 sign ups the pledge will activate!

freeourknowledge.org/2024-01-30-c...
Collective Action In Science Diamond
Publish one diamond open access article in 5 years
freeourknowledge.org
January 23, 2026 at 1:53 PM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
In early 2023 I pitched this piece at a couple of glam journals ideophone.org/human-creati...

I guess it was not AI-credulous enough 🤷
It turned out to be prophetic though.

"We are currently witnessing the first cohort of people tempted into treating text generators as thinking companions."
Header of blog post with image of Emilie du Chatelet and the heading "Human creativity in the age of text generators"
January 23, 2026 at 1:47 PM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
When you think two years of running in the chatgpt hamster wheel is "academic work"

(via @mathijsvdsande.bsky.social)
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
When two years of academic work vanished with a single click
After turning off ChatGPT’s ‘data consent’ option, Marcel Bucher lost the work behind grant applications, teaching materials and publication drafts. Here’s what happened next.
www.nature.com
January 22, 2026 at 10:38 PM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
the hegemony of English is fairly recent, so anyone who wants to dig into foundational issues must work multilingually. E.g. these two paragraphs in my 2018 review of the history of ideophone research cite work in German, Sanskrit, English, Latin, Portuguese and French doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.444
2 The discovery of ideophones The earliest extant linguistic document to mention imitative words is Pāṇini’s Ashṭādhyāyī on Sanskrit, usually dated to the 4th century BCE. Pāṇini’s succinct statements on the matter are found in sutra’s I.4.62, V.4.57, VI.1.98-100 and VIII.2.4 and revolve around the notion of anukáraṇa, or imitative words (Hoffkann 1952; Pāṇini 1962). Two structural observations are made: these words are marked by the quotative –iti, and they often occur in reduplicated form. Both hold for many ideophone systems today (Güldemann 2008). In the wider Indian context, a short list of ideophones is found under this same term anukáraṇa in an 8th century AD dictionary of Ancient Tamil, a Dravidian language (Chevillard 2004). This continuity is not often recognised and presents opportunities for research on the diachrony of ideophone systems. In Western philology, some of the first mentions of ideophone-like words appear in grammatical treatises of Japanese. An early grammar of Japanese, Diego Collado’s Ars grammaticae Iaponicae linguae, appears to refer to the utterance-final morphosyntax and marked prosody of Japanese ideophones by characterising them as “aduerbia concludendi & aduertendi”, adverbs that conclude and draw attention (Collado 1632: 56). The marked forms and perceptual meanings of ideophones are highlighted in a characterisation that goes back to Rodrigues’ 1604 Arte da lingoa de Iapam (I translate from an abridged 1825 French version):2 §81. The Japanese have a great number of adverbs which serve not only to express the manner of an event, but
January 22, 2026 at 2:26 PM
Reposted by Mark Dingemanse
duhe.bsky.social
Pro tip for scholars: make sure you have a homepage that is not acdemia.edu,researchgate, or google scholar, and has your correct affiliation and contact information. This is doubly true if you are in a less mainstream institution, between jobs, or other unusual setting.
January 20, 2026 at 6:39 AM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
"The first recorded Lithuanian word, reported to have been said on 24 December 1207 from the chronicle of Henry of Latvia, was Ba, an interjection of a Lithuanian raider after he found no loot to pillage in a Livonian church." (Wikipedia)

#FirstWords of a different kind @michaelerard.bsky.social
January 20, 2026 at 8:26 AM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
the way these spamferences do their speaker images is such a key part of their shitty branding. I sometimes wonder whether it is to intentionally select for people who care only about the most superficial signifiers of status but not about details
"Who's speaking?" screenshot of web page showing a grid of 2x5 images. Every image is resized to roughly square without regard to the original proportions, resulting in almost every single image being squished and stretched horizontally or vertically.
January 19, 2026 at 3:45 PM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
"A world where many worlds fit" — @samiraibnelkaid.bsky.social interweaves Arturo Escobar, convivialism and interdependence in a new post on the Futures of Language site markdingemanse.net/futures/news...

Part of a new series in which we introduce ideas & scholars that inform & inspire us!
"Today, difference is embodied for me most powerfully in the concept of the pluriverse, a world where many words fit, as the Zapatista put it with stunning clarity." Pluriversality "is about an ethical and political practice of alterity that involves a deep concern for social justic, the radical equality of all beings, and nonhierarchy." "It's about the difference that all marginalized and subaltern groups have to live with day in and day out, and that only privileged groups can afford to overlook as they act as if the entire world were, or should be, as they see it." — Escobar, A. (2018) Designs for the Pluriverse.
January 19, 2026 at 1:42 PM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
In the past decade or two, predatory publishers have built a parallel universe of publication opportunities preying on the least privileged & most vulnerable of our colleagues

I got my hands on what passes for peer review at one such journal
ideophone.org/on-plagiaris...
On plagiarism, predatory publishers and creating the future we want – The Ideophone
ideophone.org
January 16, 2026 at 7:51 AM
Reposted by Mark Dingemanse
leguinbot.bsky.social
In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves.
January 16, 2026 at 3:25 AM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
Evergreen tweet as the AI slop paper in @springernature.com HSSComms keeps doing the rounds

The reputation of @nature.com is suffering death by a thousand cuts thanks to this nature dot com URL branding (justified anyway IMO)
dingemansemark.bsky.social Mark Dingemanse @dingemansemark.bsky.social · Aug 24
I remain amazed at the effectiveness of the "nature․com/journal/" URL branding which invariably leads many to assume that some work is published "in Nature" when in fact it's in one of the other >160 journals owned by Springer Nature...
January 13, 2026 at 10:46 AM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
TFW they ask you to include a table to account for every single of the precise 168 hours students will be expected to spend on this 6EC course
part of a table showing "For MA variant: reading this syllabus, collecting readings, thinking about study load: 1 hour 12 x 2h lectures: 24 hours"
January 12, 2026 at 2:06 PM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
"Silence [...] is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving."

Ivan Illich, Silence is a commons, 1984
Silence is a commons – The Ideophone
ideophone.org
January 12, 2026 at 12:41 PM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
This is how to uphold standards of research integrity 👇👏
ethankutlu.bsky.social Dr. Ethan Kutlu @ethankutlu.bsky.social · Jan 8
Thank you for sharing this! Recently, I decided to not submit our final manuscript which was accepted. We didn’t receive any feedback on our science and the only review we received was AI generated wording changes. It is the same journal. I emailed the editorial team too and I received no answer.
January 8, 2026 at 7:22 PM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
Re: the AI slop paper shared by @thomaspellard.bsky.social and @lameensouag.bsky.social, I wrote to the editors — will update when I get a reply, and will be following closely what they do.

Key point is that we should hold the *journal* accountable for this mess

I have a few predictions...

1/n
AI slop published on your watch: very bad look for HSSComms and Springer/Nature  Dear editors, I have failed to locate contact information for most of the academic editors for Humanities and Social Sciences Communications; I trust that you will forward this message to them. I want to note that AI slop is being published on your watch in the journal you edit. This paper, out last week (Al-Jarrah 2026), is full of inaccurate claims and includes countless hallucinated references. Even a cursory look at the bibliography shows that at least 10 and probably many more references are bullshit pure and simple; the simplest explanation is that they are confabulated by generative AI, which sheds doubt on the quality of the manuscript as a whole and on the review and editorial processes at your journal. It is a great lapse of editorial judgement to let this kind of obvious drivel pass and I am warning my colleagues at MPI and Radboud to avoid your journal until clear and unambiguous action is taken. You may also want to take note that many people are finding out about this and the online discussion of this paper and of the journal's failing standards is something I hope that Springer Nature cares about. In my opinion the paper does not pass even the most minimal quality assurance checks and is fully against the COPE guidelines on publication ethics. You may want to hold the author accountable for this; I think the only reasonable course is retraction. But the scholarly community also holds the journal accountable. By letting AI slop through, your journal is polluting the information ecology of scientific publishing. Amidst a rising tide of synthetic text, scholarly publishing, with its tradition of human oversight and strong peer revidew, should be one of the last stalwarts to defend the integrity of our research. I look forward to your response and to find out what decisive action you are taking.
January 8, 2026 at 5:14 PM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
New on the blog: Requiem for writing town ideophone.org/requiem-for-...

On the co-working space we had for our team in corona times, what we learned about interactional affordances, why surface realism is overrated, and how we created a sense of connectedness (also ft. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social)
Requiem for writing town – The Ideophone
ideophone.org
January 7, 2026 at 9:47 PM
dingemansemark.bsky.social
Re: the Grok 'apology', already in 2023 we wrote that LLMs are devoid of social accountability so that an apology-shaped string of output tokens is meaningless doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

we should hold makers accountable for what their text and image generators spit out
Whether following predesigned dialog flows or generated by next token prediction, the output of conversational interfaces is fundamentally devoid of accountability: it is text produced without a commitment to truth or joint action [72]. By tailoring textual output to be maximally in line with what human raters prefer, techniques like reinforcement learning with human feedback obscure this lack of accountability but do not fundamentally change it: a text generator may ‘apologise’ when prompted for clarification or correction but will indifferently regurgitate the same misunderstanding or a new one on the next occasion
January 7, 2026 at 6:57 AM