Linguistic capitalism and algorithms as media
The DHLAB investigates the linguistic effects of digital technologies focusing on two important recent transformations. Firstly, words have recently become an important economic resource. In the new markets of “linguistic capitalisms” simply selling words can permits to generate billion of dollars of revenues. Secondly, algorithms are becoming common mediators of our our written expression, in particular through autocompletion services, automatic translation algorithms and other text-producing programs. We believe these two effect can have significant effects on natural languages. Thus we are developing tools and concepts to study these phenomena.