ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Global Knowledge(s): From Mono- to Plurilingual Research at the Intersection of Digital Humanities/AI, Language Corpora, and the Making of Scientific Knowledge

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Language is not a neutral medium of science; it is the material through which scientific thought and historical fields of knowledge are shaped, stabilized, and transmitted. Yet language has never been singular. Human communication has always been plurilingual—mediated through translation, cross-scriptal comparison, and code-switching between technical, vernacular, and symbolic forms. This panel explores how recent Digital Humanities (DH) initiatives are transforming our understanding of plurilingualism as both a historical condition and a methodological imperative for the history of science.
Four case studies anchor our discussion: the CUNEI Form project on cuneiform lexica and their digital reconstitution; Chen Yiwen’s database of Chinese bamboo slips and their textual reassembly; Michael Stanley-Baker’s Polyglot Asian Medicine corpus on recipes and materia medica; and Michaela Wiesinger’s digital edition of European vernacular arithmetic texts. Each project operates within a distinct linguistic world—Akkadian, Classical Chinese, medical Chinese, and early modern European mathematical vernaculars—yet all confront the same challenge: how to encode, compare, and interpret language (2 written/oral, 2 expert/common) multiplicity in digital form.
By bringing these projects into conversation, the panel asks how the digital turn in textual scholarship reshapes our understanding of linguistic diversity in scientific practice, and what it means to model historical plurilingualism in data structures and machine learning systems. The discussion extends to the ethics and epistemology of current large language models (LLMs), which echo both the promise and the perils of translation as a technology of knowledge transfer.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Dagmar Schaefer, MPIWG

Commentator

• Anthony Cerulli, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Individual Presentations

• Encoding Equivalence: The CUNEI Form Project and Ancient Bilingual Lexica - Klaus Wagensonner

• Rejoining Voices: Multilingual and Multimodal Challenges in Chinese Bamboo-Slip Databases - Yiwen Chen, Northwest University

• The Language of Materia Medica: Translating Knowledge in Plurilingual Infrastructures Bencao Corpora - Michael Stanley-Baker

• Words, Numbers, and Symbols: Vernacular Arithmetic and the Digital Turn - Michaela Wiesinger

Session Organizer

• Yiwen Chen, Northwest University