[Linganth] CfA: 4S Open Panel on "Computational Code-Switching"

[Anna Weichselbraun]

Dear colleagues,

We from the Language Machines Network (Siri Lamoureaux, Michael Castelle, and I) are excited that our open panel titled "Computational Code-Switching: Language, Labor, and Knowledge in the Age of LLMs” was accepted to 4S in Toronto in October. We invite paper abstracts that broadly fit with any aspect of our panel description, so if you are working on LLMs/AI and thinking about language/s, labor/work and/or knowledge in any way, we would love to know.

Here’s the link: https://www.4sonline.org/accepted_open_panels_toronto.php

Please feel free to forward this message to those who might be interested and to reach out if you have any questions about the suitability of your abstract.

Very best wishes,
Anna Weichselbraun


Here’s the abstract for our Panel #102:
Among fears about AI automating labor, the potential obsolescence of software engineers themselves presents an unanticipated irony. Today's coding assistants awe even the most hardened “code-as-craft” engineers. This capability stems from an under-appreciated fact in the social sciences and humanities: namely, that large language models (LLMs) are trained on massive corpora that typically do not distinguish between natural and programming languages. They can thus generate, translate, and blend both within the same interaction, raising questions about computational code-switching, register shifts across representational modes, and the transformation of human capacities to move across natural and programming languages.

The success of language models in automating programming invites investigations into at least three domains critical to STS: (1) labor and automation (Light 1999, Suchman 2007, Forsythe 2001, Higgins 2007, Beltran 2023, Bialski 2024, Evans and Johns 2023), (2) language and code (Bowker 1993, Mackenzie 2006, Benjamin 2019, Gambetta 2009, Geoghegan 2023, Cohn 2019, Kockelman 2017, 2024) and (3) the representation of knowledge (Bowker & Star 1999, Lampland & Star 2009).

We invite papers that investigate these domains in relation to LLMs or other communication technologies. 
(1) What types of engineering work and gendered/racial divisions of linguistic labor do LLMs necessitate in their development or application? How are expertise and professionalism changing in response? 
(2) How might contemporary AI’s confluence of language and code require rethinking 20th century theories of information and language (e.g. cybernetics, information theory, structuralism, generative linguistics, and computational theory)? What do LLM’s multilingual and multimodal capabilities mean for these relationships? 
(3) How might LLMs’ gradient modeling of language and knowledge in high-dimensional vector space — rather than fixed taxonomies — challenge existing theorizations of information systems as classificatory infrastructure? What does “codification” mean under conditions of vectorization?



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Anna Weichselbraun, PhD
Senior Research Fellow, Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, Universität Wien
http://www.annaweichselbraun.com
 <http://www.annaweichselbraun.com/>
New articles! 

	Kohavi, Noya, and Anna Weichselbraun. 2026. “Human Tests for Machine Models: What Lies ‘Beyond the Imitation Game’?” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology  https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70035.
	Lamoureaux, Siri, Michael Castelle, and Anna Weichselbraun. 2026. “Language Machines: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Large Language Models.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70033.
Weichselbraun, Anna. 2025. “Die epistemischen Affordanzen von Papier: Beobachtungen zur Digitalisierung eines Handbuchs.” Zeitschrift für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft. Journal for Cultural Analysis and European Ethnology 121 (2): 231–52. https://doi.org/10.31244/zekw/2025/02.04.

Join the workshop on LLMs and linguistic anthropology! Meets monthly to discuss pre-circulated papers. Email languagemachinesnetwork at gmail.com <mailto:languagemachinesnetwork at gmail.com> to join the list.

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