Studying AI in academic practice: A linguistic ethnographic perspective

Description

Previous research on the use of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) in higher education has tended to be either experimental or quantitative in nature. Research of this kind tends to be decontextualized from everyday social practice, and we therefore know very little about the role and meaning of GAI in the social worlds of students. Thus, if we want to understand the role of generative language technology in academic practice—and its implications for the acquisition and production of knowledge—we need linguistic ethnographic case studies that enable us to explore the situated use of GAI in everyday interactional contexts in higher education. This is the aim of the sociolinguistic research project “AI and the University: Towards a sociolinguistics of literacy and voice in the age of generative language technology” (AI-UNI), which will launch six such case studies among student and research groups across different academic disciplines from the spring semester of 2025. The linguistic ethnographic approach to the study of GAI in academia presents several methodological challenges. In this talk, I present some of the ways in which we in the AI-UNI research group are currently discussing how to address these challenges, using my own PhD project as an example.

Period	28 Nov 2024
Event title	Conference on Language, Norms and Digital Lives
Event type	Conference
Conference number	1