Cite Club
Our growing collection of social science work on the topic of Language Machines.
What is a Cite Club? #
Events in the tech world with respect to AI and LLMs are happening at such a pace it is difficult to keep on top of current scholarship. The aim of this project is to increase visibility of recent publications in the social sciences of language machines. Although we are specifically interested in the tools of linguistic anthropology and closely related disciplines (EMCA, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, media anthropology, sociology, language and technology philosophy, STS), we are happy to include publications from other disciplines (media studies, digital humanities, HRI, CSCW, history of science, computer science, etc.) as long as they further the conversation that brings us to together.
The Cite Club is a community-sourced resource. We send out a call for your contributions periodically over the mailing list.
Browse the full library directly on Zotero.
Our Publications
- Computing consensus: Language ideological work in LLM-assisted deliberative democracy
— Janet E. Connor
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (2026) - The chatbot's real self: On the archaeology of artificial personas
— Courtney Handman
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (05/2026) - Human tests for machine models: What lies “Beyond the Imitation Game”?
— Noya Kohavi, Anna Weichselbraun
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (05/2026) - “It doesn't give a s*** about Arabic or English”: Semiotic ideologies and demarcation among LLM engineers in Amman, Jordan
— Tariq Adely
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (05/2026) - Co‐textual dopes: How LLMs produce contextually appropriate text in chat interactions with humans without access to context
— Ole Pütz
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (05/2026) - Language machines: Toward a linguistic anthropology of large language models
— Siri Lamoureaux, Michael Castelle, Anna Weichselbraun
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (05/2026) - Nonhuman situational enmeshments—How participants build temporal infrastructures for ChatGPT
— Nils Klowait, Maria Erofeeva
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (05/2026) - Co‐textual dopes: How <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">LLMs</span> produce contextually appropriate text in chat interactions with humans without access to context
— Ole Pütz
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (2025-12-04)
Reading List
- Is Language Social Action? A Commentary on Language Agents
— Michael Castelle
Sociologica (2026-08-06) - The language of AI: on the work of metaphor and metapragmatics in making artificial intelligence
— Sahana Udupa, Peter Hervik, Tariq Adely
(2026-07-21) - Domesticating robots, domesticating language: The hylomorphic paradox of “openness” in large language models
— Raffaele Andrea Buono
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (08/2026) - Herder in the lab: Maximizing “cultural density” in multilingual training data for an open‐science <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">AI</span> project
— Joseph Wilson
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (12/2026) - Responding from the Vector Space
— Courtney Handman
Representations (2026-08-01) - Making Persons out of Personas in Human–Chatbot Relationships (or, the Work of Hearts in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction)
— Courtney Handman
Signs and Society (2026-08-28) - Code from nowhere
— Heikki Wilenius
(2026-06-03) - Sociolinguists against the AI hype? AI tools in sociolinguistics scholarship
— Bettina Migge, Britta Schneider, Iker Erdocia
Linguistics Vanguard (2026-09-14) - Semiotics of artificial intelligence: enunciative praxis in image analysis and generation
— Maria Giulia Dondero
Semiotica (2025-01-29) - The Compositional Rhetoric of Multimodal Generative AI: About Tropes and Stereotypes
— Maria Giulia Dondero
Signata (2026) - Language in the Godless Age of AI
— Radek Schuster, Hamid R. Ekbia
Social Epistemology (2026-01-02) - Anthropology of artificial intelligence: agency, powerful knowledge, and the algorithmic other
— Sahana Udupa, Peter Hervik, Michael Fischer, Sally Applin
(2026-07-21) - Extending Digital Narrative with AI, Games, Chatbots, and XR: How Experimental Creative Practice Yields Research Insights
— Lina Ruth Harder, David Jhave Johnston, Scott Rettberg, Sérgio Galvão Roxo, Haoyuan Tang
Humanities (2026-01-16) - (A)I Cannot See Them: A Situated Reflection on the Simulation of Historical Figures
— Lina Ruth Harder
Open Library of Humanities (2026-06-24) - Malinowski in the Age of AI: Can large language models create a text game based on an anthropological classic?
— Michael Hoffmann, Jan Fillies, Adrian Paschke
(2024-10-03) - Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies
— Mark Dingemanse
(2026-07-15) - ELIZA—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine
— Joseph Weizenbaum
Communications of the ACM (01/1966) - Do Datasets Have Politics? Disciplinary Values in Computer Vision Dataset Development
— Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, Emily Denton, Alex Hanna
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (2021-10-13) - Connexion
- Standard Language Ideology in AI-Generated Language
— Genevieve Smith, Eve Fleisig, Ishita Rustagi, Xavier Yin
(2024) - An Anthropologist’s Guide to Better Automation
— Ilana Gershon, Caitrin Lynch
Communications of the ACM (01/2026) - Linguistic anthropology of AI: an afterword
— Ilana Gershon
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2026-04-19) - Structured like a language model: Analysing AI as an automated subject
— Liam Magee, Vanicka Arora, Luke Munn
Big Data & Society (07/2023) - Truth machines: synthesizing veracity in AI language models
— Luke Munn, Liam Magee, Vanicka Arora
AI & SOCIETY (12/2024) - The problem of alignment
— Tsvetelina Hristova, Liam Magee, Karen Soldatic
AI & SOCIETY (03/2025) - Automating Thematic Analysis: How LLMs Analyse Controversial Topics
— Awais Hameed Khan, Hiruni Kegalle, Rhea D'Silva, Ned Watt, Daniel Whelan-Shamy, Lida Ghahremanlou, Liam Magee
(2024) - The Drama Machine: Simulating Character Development with LLM Agents
— Liam Magee, Vanicka Arora, Gus Gollings, Norma Lam-Saw
(2024) - Computational scapegoats: from mimetic to alienated desire in the production of large language models
— Liam Magee
Subjectivity (06/2025) - Taxonomizing Representational Harms using Speech Act Theory
— Emily Corvi, Hannah Washington, Stefanie Reed, Chad Atalla, Alexandra Chouldechova, P. Alex Dow, Jean Garcia-Gathright, Nicholas J Pangakis, Emily Sheng, Dan Vann, Matthew Vogel, Hanna Wallach
(2025) - ‘Everything is a signal’: speaking circuits and noisy signs in the making of language‐oriented AI
— Beth M. Semel
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2026-04-20) - The design and discursive construction of a ‘speaking’ vacuum cleaning robot for assistive purposes: Findings on communication ideologies from a current research and development project
— Sabine Lehner
AI-Linguistica. Linguistic Studies on AI-Generated Texts and Discourses (2025-01-28) - “We Share an Unbreakable Bond:” Sociality and Language Ideologies in Human Relationships with Artificial Intelligence
— Arelí Rocha
Signs and Society (06/2025) - A Real Account of Deep Fakes
— Benjamin Sobel
Michigan Law Review (2026-04-01) - Animal translations: AI and the intelligibility of non‐human worlds
— Courtney Handman
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2026-04-14) - Unsettled Scripts: Script Invention and the Bind of Digital Recognition
— Anushah Hossain
Modern Languages Open (2026-03-11) - On recognizing the handiwork of AI
— Nick Seaver
American Ethnologist (05/2026) - AI Surrogates and illusions of generalizability in cognitive science
— M. J. Crockett, Lisa Messeri
Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2026-03-01) - On the Calculation of Meaning, or Doing Words without Things
— Mercedes Bunz
Critical Inquiry (2026-03-01) - Introduction: Towards a linguistic anthropology of AI
— Webb Keane, Constantine V. Nakassis
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute - Agents Without Agency: Anthropological and Sociological Lessons for Contemporary AI Research and Policy
— Greta Timaite, Michael Castelle
Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (2025-10-15) - Humans of AI: understanding the people behind the machines
— Joseph B. Wilson
(2026) - The algorithm's hidden layers: Nurturant matrices, quantitative poetry, and the religious ethics of language technology
— Zachary Sheldon
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (2026) - Animation and Artificial Intelligence
— Luke Stark
(2024-06-03) - What company do words keep? Revisiting the distributional semantics of J.R. Firth & Zellig Harris
— Mikael Brunila, Jack LaViolette, Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
(2022-07) - Innovating Alexa amid the Rise of Large Language Models: Sociotechnical Transitions in Algorithmic Development Practices
— Stephan Habscheid, Tim Hector, Dagmar Hoffmann, David Waldecker, Niklas Strüver
(2024-12-31) - Infrastructural platforms as producers of incremental innovation: Investigating software development in Amazon's Alexa Prize Competition
— Niklas Strüver
Platforms & Society (11/2025) - The material making of language as practice of global domination and control: continuations from European colonialism to AI
— Bettina Migge, Britta Schneider
AI & SOCIETY (12/2025) - Developing Critical AI Language Literacy—prompting experiments on raciolinguistic bias to understand large language models as cultural artefacts
— Britta Schneider, Milene Oliveira
AI & SOCIETY (2025-11-06) - Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri’s language options: how voice assistants reproduce monoglossic language ideologies
— Mandy Lau
AI & SOCIETY (12/2025) - Enunciative Praxis and Enregisterment in the Domain of Generative Artificial Intelligence
— Maria Giulia Dondero
Semiotic Review (2025-09-05) - Cosine capital: Large language models and the embedding of all things
— Mikael Brunila
Big Data & Society (12/2025) - Sexbots Playing the Imitation Game
— Jon Bialecki
Social Analysis (2023-09-01) - Someone Behind This Technology: Conversation Designers in the Artificial Intelligence Loop
— Elizabeth Rodwell
Engineering Studies (2025-09-02) - External Intelligence: Oracles, Divination and Animism, and the Use of LLMs/Generative AI
— Shing-Ling S. Chen, Michael D. Fischer, Sally A. Applin, Sridhar Ravula
(2025-12-01) - Aya Dataset: An Open-Access Collection for Multilingual Instruction Tuning
— Shivalika Singh, Freddie Vargus, Daniel D’souza, Börje Karlsson, Abinaya Mahendiran, Wei-Yin Ko, Herumb Shandilya, Jay Patel, Deividas Mataciunas, Laura O’Mahony, Mike Zhang, Ramith Hettiarachchi, Joseph Wilson, Marina Machado, Luisa Moura, Dominik Krzemiński, Hakimeh Fadaei, Irem Ergun, Ifeoma Okoh, Aisha Alaagib, Oshan Mudannayake, Zaid Alyafeai, Vu Chien, Sebastian Ruder, Surya Guthikonda, Emad Alghamdi, Sebastian Gehrmann, Niklas Muennighoff, Max Bartolo, Julia Kreutzer, Ahmet Üstün, Marzieh Fadaee, Sara Hooker
(2024) - The Ghost in the Machine: Metaphors of the ‘Virtual’ and the ‘Artificial’ in Post-WW2 Computer Science
— Joseph Wilson
Perspectives on Science (2024-06-01) - The chatbot's real self: On the archaeology of artificial personas
— Courtney Handman
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (2025-12-26) - Introduction: Unthinking language from a posthumanist perspective
— Britta Schneider, Theresa Heyd
Signs and Society (2024) - AI in situated action: a scoping review of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies
— Jakub Mlynář, Lynn de Rijk, Andreas Liesenfeld, Wyke Stommel, Saul Albert
AI & SOCIETY (2025-03-01) - Human tests for machine models: What lies “Beyond the Imitation Game”?
— Noya Kohavi, Anna Weichselbraun
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (2025-11-24) - The sociolinguistic foundations of language modeling
— Jack Grieve, Sara Bartl, Matteo Fuoli, Jason Grafmiller, Weihang Huang, Alejandro Jawerbaum, Akira Murakami, Marcus Perlman, Dana Roemling, Bodo Winter
Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (2025-1-13) - Language machines: Toward a linguistic anthropology of large language models
— Siri Lamoureaux, Michael Castelle, Anna Weichselbraun
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (2025-11-28) - Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine
— Norbert Wiener
(2007) - Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine
— Norbert Wiener
(2007) - Ghost work: how to stop Silicon Valley from building a new global underclass
— Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri
(2019) - When Being a Data Annotator Was Not Yet a Job: The Laboratory Origins of Dispersible Labor in Computer Vision Research
— Zhuofan Li
Socius (2024-12-01) - Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research
— Lisa Messeri, M. J. Crockett
Nature (2024-03-01) - Semiotics and language: an analytical dictionary
— Algirdas Julien Greimas, Joseph Courtés
(1982) - SEMIOTICS AND LANGUAGE: AN ANALYTICAL DICTIONARY, A. J. Greimas and J. Courtés. Translated by Larry Christ, Daniel Patte, James Lee, Edward McMahonII, Gary Phillips, & Michael Rengstorf. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983. Pp. 432.
— James W. Brown
Studies in Second Language Acquisition (10/1985) - “There’s No Data Like More Data”: Automatic Speech Recognition and the Making of Algorithmic Culture
— Xiaochang Li
Osiris (2023-07-01) - The Nooscope manifested: AI as instrument of knowledge extractivism
— Matteo Pasquinelli, Vladan Joler
AI & SOCIETY (12/2021) - Synthetic Probes: A Qualitative Experiment in Latent Space Exploration
— Gabriele De Seta
Sociologica (2024-10-30) - Which Theory of Language for Deep Neural Networks? Speech and Cognition in Humans and Machines
— Luca Capone
(2021) - On ideology and labor in language technologies — Justine Zhang
- Conflicting feelings: sociological and computational sentiment in workplace sentiment surveillance
— Evan Donahue, Matthew Canute, Adjua Akinwumi, Philippa R. Adams, Maite Taboada, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
AI & SOCIETY (2025-09-22) - ‘Python is ready to have a conversation with you’: the reproduction of an ontology of language in natural language processing educational material
— Joseph Wilson
AI & SOCIETY (2025-05-27) - Language machines: cultural AI and the end of remainder humanism
— Leif Weatherby
(2025) - On Algorithmic Divination | Platypus — Rebecca Carlson
- Poietic symbiosis or algorithmic subjugation: generative AI technology in marketing communications education
— Gulnara Z. Karimova, Yevgeniya D. Kim, Amir Shirkhanbeik
Education and Information Technologies (02/2025) - Whose Language Counts as High Quality? Measuring Language Ideologies in Text Data Selection
— Suchin Gururangan, Dallas Card, Sarah K. Dreier, Emily K. Gade, Leroy Z. Wang, Zeyu Wang, Luke Zettlemoyer, Noah A. Smith
(2022-01-26) - Language is not a data set—Why overcoming ideologies of dataism is more important than ever in the age of AI
— Iker Erdocia, Bettina Migge, Britta Schneider
Journal of Sociolinguistics (2024) - Empirical evidence of Large Language Model's influence on human spoken communication
— Hiromu Yakura, Ezequiel Lopez-Lopez, Levin Brinkmann, Ignacio Serna, Prateek Gupta, Ivan Soraperra, Iyad Rahwan
(2025-07-08) - Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing
(2025-09-15T15:29:56Z) - Linguistic Affordances Framework: A Linguistic-Sociological Approach for the Social Study of Language Technology
— Haley Lepp, Aj Alvero
Social Science Computer Review (2025-08-19) - “You Cannot Sound Like GPT": Signs of language discrimination and resistance in computer science publishing
— Haley Lepp, Daniel Scott Smith
(June 23, 2025) - Intelligence as Agency: Evaluating the Capacity of Generative AI to Empower or Constrain Human Action
— Arvind Satyanarayan, Graham M. Jones
An MIT Exploration of Generative AI (2024-03-27) - Theseus in the Epistemic Labyrinth: A Critical History of the Semantic Differential Method and the Apparent Weight of Color –Evan Donahue
(2021-09-05T23:55:13+00:00) - All the Microworld’s a Stage: Realism in Interactive Fiction and Artificial Intelligence
— Evan Donahue
American Literature (2023-06-01) - Language in the age of AI technology: From human to non-human authenticity, from public governance to privatised assemblages
— Iker Erdocia, Britta Schneider, Bettina Migge
Language in Society (2025-06-20) - Language is not a data set—Why overcoming ideologies of dataism is more important than ever in the age of AI
— Iker Erdocia, Bettina Migge, Britta Schneider
Journal of Sociolinguistics (11/2024) - Intelligence as Agency: Evaluating the Capacity of Generative AI to Empower or Constrain Human Action
— Arvind Satyanarayan, Graham M. Jones, Sarah Gephart
An MIT Exploration of Generative AI (2024-03-27) - NLP as language ideology: discursive and algorithmic constructions of ‘toxic’ language in machine learning research
— Gabriella Chronis
AI & SOCIETY (2025-07-16)