Between Philology and Machine Learning

This course brings philology and media studies into new conversations around the multimediality and historicity of language. It expands the timescale, archives, and methods of the two disciplines to address the relations between language, mind and body; visual and verbal style; alphabetic and logographic writing; animation and knowledge production; and linguistic and cultural/racial/ gendered embodiment. What are the benefits of giving media archaeology a deeper history of language? What can antiquarians learn from media studies? How can we rethink the assumptions in deep learning and the Large Language Model (LLM) by considering diverse situated and embodied contexts? We will explore recent debates about language, computation, and cognition in AI, digital media, and historical linguistics, and reconsider the place of philology and science studies in knowledge production. Critical readings and cases will be drawn from the ancient and contemporary worlds.