DISKUSS Workshops

The Patch: Playing with linguistic data

In this arts-based workshop we will provide entry points for the education community to experience, play with, and represent their own research data in new ways. Through engagement with electronic technologies and digital applications, we will investigate and experiment with different models of processing and representing language as data. The workshop will involve several stations where participants can feed texts in iterative cycles through adjustable signal transformation parameters or ‘patches’. This is a generative process during which we will invite you to make, mix, and mash up meaning while marvelling at human-computer linguistic transactions. The collective output of these cycles of analogue and digital text transformations will be visualized and sonified so that everyone can share in witnessing digital research as a participatory and aesthetically driven endeavour. We will conclude with a discussion about possible research questions, applied uses, and potential knowledge mobilization opportunities of digital experimentation and collaborative, participatory research practices for studies related to language in use and sociocultural practices of literacy.