Rhyme and Reason

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“A letter may be coded, and a word may be coded. A theatrical performance may be coded, and a sonnet may be coded, and there are times when it seems the entire world is in code.”

 This piece of philosophy comes from one of my favourite childhood authors, and it’s one which can often provide some comfort when the world feels mysterious and unreasonable: It’s not that the world doesn’t make sense, it’s that the sense it makes is obscured by a layer of puzzles and codes just waiting for you to figure them out.

That’s if you read the quote as referring to the more general meaning of the word ‘code’. For my exam in computational linguistics, I decided …

A Computational Linguist with HOPE

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In late February 2020, I found myself sitting at a table in the Interacting Minds Center with a diverse group of Aarhus University researchers discussing how to research the social and behavioural aspects of the emerging Covid-19 epidemic. The expertise of the other researchers spanned media and information studies, anthropology and ethnography, religious studies, political science, and computer science. I represented linguistics. At the time, Covid-19 had not (to our knowledge) reached Denmark, and it was still at least a week before the WHO would officially designate it a global pandemic. We suspected that this virus might have significant consequences for our lives, but we could never have imagined how much and how quickly.

Just weeks later, …