DataX

Join us for a Data Justice Research Series talk presented by Dr. Mengesha. Lunch will be provided! Description: Over the past 60 years, sociolinguists have documented variation in African Americans’ speech. This work has resulted in a large body of literature detailing the complex relations among language, gender, sexuality, race, power, and class. The development language technologies, such as automated speech recognition (ASR) and large language models, has raised new questions about dialect fairness and accessibility, which sociolinguistics is apt to address. In this talk, Zion Mengesha present three case studies for the application of sociolinguistics to artificial intelligence. Using the dialect density measure, the first study shows that all five major speech recognizers misunderstood African American speakers up to two times more than white speakers, revealing how speech technologies reproduce standard language ideologies. The second study examines the psychological and behavioral consequences of dialect discrimination using video data collected over a 2-week diary study of African Americans’ interactions with voice technology. The final study shows linguistic consequences of ASR misrecognition, examining how African Americans modify their prosody and morphosyntax in order to be better understood. She concludes with a discussion on how to apply sociolinguistic insights about African American English (AAE) to artificial intelligence to advance technological justice for speakers of African American English and other minoritized language varieties.

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About the book: What if we could start over and build the Internet from scratch? How could it be rebuilt or reimagined as more equitable and just? For more than eight years, Britt S. Paris investigated alternative Internet infrastructure projects, conducting interviews, site visits, and policy analysis. In this expansive and interdisciplinary study, Paris critically examines the myriad and contradictory promises, utility, and obstacles to building a completely new Internet. Radical Infrastructure locates and analyzes the boundaries of how people and groups imagine, build, deploy, maintain, and use the Internet as they survive—and even dare to thrive—in challenging political, economic, and environmental contexts. Ultimately, Paris encourages active reflection among scholars, policymakers, and activists and reveals more grounded imaginaries, tactics, and opportunities for future people-centered projects.

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Join us for a celebration and conversation commemorating the publication of Data Consciousness: Reframing Blackness in Contemporary Print, edited by Dr. Tiffany Barber. This volume accompanies the exhibition of the same name, which was featured at Print Center New York, from September 18–December 20, 2025. The book features contributions from Dr. Safiya Noble and Los Angeles-based designer and artist Silas Munro, whose work appeared in the original exhibition, alongside his colleague Randa Hadi, who served as the lead designer for the book. The event includes a conversation between Dr. Barber, Dr. Noble, Munro, and Hadi, followed by a showcase of graduate student research at the intersection of Black Studies, Critical Data Studies, and Aesthetics. Data Consciousness Reframing Blackness in Contemporary Print engages with the intellectual legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois and his contributions to sociology, art, and aesthetics. Through this engagement, they explore how technology and data increasingly mediate issues of race, identity, and equity.

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