Alfred Lo was awarded a bursary to attend the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School in 2024. To join the mailing list and learn about the next summer school sign up here. Read about Alfred's experience at the summer school here:
I am Alfred Lo, a DPhil student in Applied Linguistics and East Asian Studies at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, the University of Oxford. My research centres on language communication and the language learning processes among multilinguals. There is a growing speculation about whether language education and language itself might one day be supplanted by AI. I, as a linguist and an educator, felt it was crucial to understand further and deeper how AI functions (or fails to) and what its implications might be for communication and education. This year, I was very fortunate to receive a competitive bursary to attend the world-renowned Oxford Digital Humanities Summer School (OxDHSS). I selected the strand on AI and Creative Technologies, drawn particularly by the focus on creativity alongside AI. Creativity, after all, is often considered uniquely human, a quality that seems to set us apart from machines. I was then eager to explore how AI and creative technologies might provide new affordances for language communication and education.
Joining online, I found two sessions particularly impactful: the session on GenAI and LLMs, and another on ethnography in digital environments. The explanation of how LLMs process unstructured text and their broad cross-linguistic capabilities prompted me to reflect on their potential applications in multilingual education. Could AI help bridge linguistic gaps in diverse classrooms, or does its reliance on pre-existing datasets risk reproducing social and cultural inequalities? This question felt particularly relevant as I considered the ethical and pedagogical challenges of integrating AI into language teaching. The session on ethnography offered valuable insights into how ethnography can be adapted to research digital spaces. I learned so much about the framing of digital ethnography as a means not only of studying language use but also of understanding the social structures, ideologies, and dynamics that underpin communication in digital environments.
The summer school has left me deeply grateful to the organisers and those who made my bursary possible. The knowledge and insights I gained from the programme have been invaluable for both my current research and my future endeavours. Inspired by this experience, I am now planning to attend a winter programme at Korea University later this year, focusing on the evolution of AI in linguistics. The foundation laid by the OxDHSS will, I believe, not only provide me with a solid grounding as I engage with new ideas but also enable me to contribute meaningfully to discussions with peers in this specialised area. This experience has given me the confidence to critically evaluate the role of AI in language and to imagine its future implications for both scholarship and practice. I look forward to walking hand in hand with AI!
