Michael Castelle
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mcastelle.bsky.social
Michael Castelle
@mcastelle.bsky.social
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mcastelle.bsky.social
> be a human in an oral society without writing
> all you hear are phonemes
> you don't care, it's all abstracted away (Sapir 1933)
> you live for a world of pure ideas, chain of concepts, reasoning streams: la pensée sauvage (Lévi-Strauss 1962)
> phonemes don't exist.
September 15, 2025 at 5:28 PM
mcastelle.bsky.social
As Lévi-Strauss once fantasized, logical properties are now perfumes. Best of luck to those attempting to reverse-engineer the subtle art of the blind idiot bricoleur-perfumers in question.
July 28, 2025 at 1:41 PM
mcastelle.bsky.social
Even my "aggressive timelines" for weird interdisciplinary consilience at the hands of deep learning would not have predicted that in 2025 you could jam this much linguistic anthropology into an ACL paper (and get selected for an oral presentation). Congrats to all involved!
naitian.org naitian @naitian.org · Jul 23
I'm thrilled to be doing an oral presentation on "Culture is not Trivia" at #ACL2025 next Wednesday 7/30, as well as participating in the human-centered NLP panel afterwards!

(thanks also @lauraknelson.bsky.social for the shoutout in her #ic2s2 keynote today!)

aclanthology.org/2025.acl-lon...
A poster for "Culture is not Trivia: sociocultural theory for cultural NLP" which takes the form of a flow-chart. The central question, and the starting point of the flow chart, is "What is culture in cultural NLP?" An arrow is labeled "wait, so what's cultural NLP?" This leads to a block explaining that the goals of cultural NLP are described in section 2 of the paper. They include inclusivity, depth, discerning, and adaptiveness. That leads to an arrow that says "that sounds great!". But there are recurring challenges in this kind of work! Section 3 surveys some of these: a discomfort around the proxies being chosen, a lack of coverage, and a lack of dynamicity. That in turn leads to an arrow labeled "Hm, sounds like we need to figure out..." and it leads back to the main question: "What is culture in cultural NLP?" A final arrow extends below this block: "Well, who's to say, really?" This points to sociocultural linguistics. Section 4 explores how other disciplines, like sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and discourse analysis have faced similar challenges in the past. Section 4.2 gives an overview of sociocultural linguistics, which is a set of principles tying together some convergent themes: emergence, positionality, indexicality, relationality, and partialness. One arrow extends from this asking, "what's that have to do with cultural NLP?" Section 5 gives a case study of how indexicality clarifies how to think about stereotypies in the context of mining cultual knowledge from the web. Another arrow says "How can I build safe NLP systems?" Section 6.2 explores how localization can serve as a useful model from building culturally aware technologies because it forces developers to define culture explicitly and tractably. Finally, an arrow asks "how can I study culture with NLP methods?" Section 6.1 lays out theoretically motivated directions for future empirical and theoretical work in computationally modeling culture.
July 23, 2025 at 4:32 PM
mcastelle.bsky.social
Very nice critique re: "democratization" in AI research from @arjunsubgraph.bsky.social and @zeerak.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2406.11598
November 14, 2024 at 9:37 AM
mcastelle.bsky.social
So you're telling me all of the billions of weight parameters underlying a seemingly uninterpretable generative model of language and culture can be ternary
February 28, 2024 at 3:56 PM
Reposted by Michael Castelle
nickseaver.website
bringing it over from the old place: ‘tis the season to read “Father Christmas Executed” (1952) by Claude Lévi-Strauss, for your yuletide structuralism fix: pds12.egloos.com/pds/200901/1...
Father Christmas was hanged yesterday afternoon from the railings of Dijon Cathedral and burnt publicly in the precinct. This spectacular execution took place in the presence of several hundred Sunday school children. It was a decision made with the agreement of the clergy who had condemned Father Christmas as a usurper and heretic. He was accused of ʻpaganizing' the Christ mas festival and installing himself like a cuckoo in the nest, claiming more and more space for himself. Above all he was blamed for infiltrating all the state schools from which the crib has been scrupulously banished.
December 22, 2023 at 11:58 PM
Reposted by Michael Castelle
vgoujon.bsky.social
Join us for EASST-4S 2024 in Amsterdam! Take a look at our panel "Rebooting the STS programme for AI: Emerging controversies and methods for studying 21st-century AI" (P228), with members of the Shaping AI project (N. Chartier-Edwards, J. Roberge, E. Grenier and @mcastelle.bsky.social). Abstracts 👇
Open Panels - EASST-4S 2024
Conference programme
www.easst4s2024.net
December 1, 2023 at 12:02 PM
Reposted by Michael Castelle
annaw.bsky.social
Are you a linguistic anthropologist (or related scholar/researcher) working on LLMs?

Submit an abstract to this open panel for EASST-4S 2024 in Amsterdam organized by me, @mcastelle.bsky.social, and Siri Lamoureaux!
November 29, 2023 at 1:57 PM