Call for Papers | Centring Creators across Intersecting Ecosystems: Labour, Agency, and Collaboration

ICA 2027 Pre-Conference

2 June 2027 – King’s College London, UK

Creators are everywhere. From YouTubers, TikTok creators, and Instagram influencers to podcasters, streamers, Wang Hong, and Douyin Key Opinion Leaders, creators have become significant actors in contemporary cultural production, communication, commerce, and public life. Their work requires them to navigate multiple platforms, industries, institutions, communities, and geographic contexts, while shifting between roles as cultural workers, entrepreneurs, intermediaries, activists, and public figures. Creators have also become important sources of peer knowledge and everyday epistemic authority, increasingly serving as go-to figures for how people learn about and interpret the world around them. Their growing presence across these domains has made creator practices an important site for understanding wider transformations in media, labour, culture, and public communication.

Research across communication and media studies, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, critical race studies, science and technology studies, celebrity studies, and related fields has produced important accounts of creator cultures and economies (e.g., Abidin & Brown, 2019; Cunningham & Craig, 2021; Bidav & Mehta, 2025; Borchers et al., 2026). This scholarship has examined creator labour and its layered precarities (Duffy et al., 2021; Fan, 2024); authenticity and the negotiation of commercial and cultural value (Bishop, 2025); platformed visibility and creators’ responses to algorithmic opacity (Bishop, 2018; Stegeman et al., 2022); creators’ everyday practices, identity, and community formation (Sujon & Ntalla, 2025); and the intersections of place, space, and creator economies (Zhang et al., 2022).

Scholarship has further examined the industrialization and distinctive labour conditions of creators and influencers (Cunningham & Craig, 2019; Annabell, 2025); entrepreneurialism, self-branding, and aspirational work (Duffy, 2017; Hund, 2023); platform governance and its discriminatory effects on creators’ livelihoods (Duffy & Meisner, 2022; Divon et al., 2025; Are, 2026); creator practices in war zones and under occupation (Heřmanová et al., 2026; Divon & Eriksson Krutrök, 2025); and inequalities structured by gender, race, class, religion, caste, disability, and geography (Glatt, 2022; Bidav & Mehta, 2024; Rauchberg, 2025; Taylor & Abidin, 2025; Yang, 2026; Divon et al., 2026; Beacken, 2026). Collectively, this work demonstrates how creators’ practices reshape industries, institutions, and communicative relations, while also making visible emerging transformations in regulation, labour, and social life that extend well beyond creator economies themselves.

While nascent and rapidly evolving, Creator and Influencer Studies may now be understood as an established interdisciplinary field (Maddox, 2026). This pre-conference proposes to advance it by centring creators within intersecting ecosystems, in response to the ICA 2027 conference theme. Rather than approaching creators primarily through their relationship with platforms, we understand them as situated cultural workers whose labour and agency unfold across technological, professional, industrial, institutional, interpersonal, and geographical contexts. These ecosystems encompass platforms, communities, brands, advertisers, agencies, states, regulators, educational institutions, unions, militaries, and other actors (Bidav, 2026; Jaramillo-Dent and Latzer, 2026), while also connecting social media content creation to wider creative and cultural industries such as journalism, publishing, music, film, television, gaming, fashion, and advertising. Across these domains, systems of distribution shape how creators’ work circulates, reaches audiences, and generates value (McDonald et al., 2021).

Centring creators within these intersecting ecosystems also means asking who gets to participate in the conversations through which creator work is studied, governed, and regulated. For Creator and Influencer Studies, this raises questions not only about creator agency, but also about inclusion in the rooms where decisions about creators and their practices are made. This pre-conference therefore seeks to bring creators into conversation with researchers and with the actors who shape the conditions of their work and everyday lives, including platforms, regulators, agencies, industry professionals, and other intermediaries. We ask how creators understand, negotiate, and connect these institutional, commercial, industrial, and social worlds, and how their capacity to act is enabled or constrained by relations of power, exploitation, dependency, care, collaboration, and solidarity.

Pre-Conference Objectives

The preconference aims to bring together scholars, creators, and industry professionals, to ask how creator industries, labour, and agency are constituted across intersecting ecosystems. It pursues four objectives:

  1. Repositioning: To situate creators as cultural workers rather than primarily as platform users, asking what becomes visible when the creator-platform relationship is treated as one among many relationships involving agencies, brands, unions, regulators, educators, and the wider creative industries.
  2. Mechanisms: To specify how creator agency is enabled, constrained, and withheld by examining dependency, care, collaboration, solidarity, and exploitation from the positions of those who work within these ecosystems and those who govern them, while asking whose labour is recognised as labour.
  3. Methods: To develop approaches suited to creator ecosystems by treating the questions of scale, access, and comparison as shared methodological challenges that platform-centred research has not fully addressed. This includes asking what creators gain from being researched.
  4. Community: To consolidate an international research field that includes the people it studies and those whose decisions shape creators’ working conditions. The pre-conference will establish research priorities and collaborations that outlast the event and begin developing a set of co-created principles and recommendations for more equitable creator-researcher collaborations and creator-industry interactions, informed by creators’ needs, expertise, and priorities.


Submission Pathways and Areas of Interest

We welcome proposals from researchers, creators, practitioners, industry professionals, and others working within or alongside creator ecosystems. To foster dialogue among actors across creator ecosystems, the pre-conference invites proposals from three perspectives:

  • Academic research: Conceptual, empirical, and methodological work that advances Creator and Influencer Studies, develops new approaches to intersecting creator ecosystems, or addresses emerging questions about creator labour, agency, and collaboration.
  • Creator perspectives: Contributions grounded in creators’ knowledge, experiences, working practices, communities, and priorities, including reflections on what creators need from research, regulation, platforms, industries, and/or other institutions.
  • Industry and institutional perspectives: Contributions from platforms, agencies, creator management and representation, regulators, policymakers, unions, civil society organisations, educators, industry professionals, and other actors whose decisions and practices shape creator ecosystems.

We particularly welcome collaborative proposals involving contributors from more than one perspective, as well as sessions designed to foster dialogue among creators, researchers, and industry or institutional actors. Contributions do not need to follow a conventional academic format. We encourage accessible, creative, and participatory formats that enable academics, creators, and industry professionals to share their experiences, expertise, and perspectives.

Contributions may address areas including, but not limited to:

  • Creator labour, livelihoods, and career trajectories
  • Creator agency, autonomy, resistance, and collective action
  • Professional identities and mobility across platforms, occupations, industries, and geographic contexts
  • Intersectional inequalities across creator ecosystems
  • Creator education, professionalisation, training, and knowledge-sharing
  • Conceptual and methodological approaches to mapping intersecting creator ecosystems
  • Research ethics, reciprocity, participation, and co-creation, including what creators and creator communities gain from being researched

Submission Instructions

Proposed formats may include:

  • Individual presentations: Individual papers presenting completed or ongoing research.
  • Pre-constituted panels: Sessions bringing together several contributors around a shared topic or question. Proposals should identify all proposed contributors, provide a brief rationale for the panel as a whole, and include a short description of each contribution.
  • Roundtables: Short contributions from several speakers, followed by an open discussion with participants.
  • Dialogues or fireside chats: Informal, guided conversations that bring together creators, scholars, industry professionals, or institutional actors to share experiences and expertise and examine a common issue from different perspectives.
  • Participatory sessions: Interactive sessions in which attendees contribute to discussion, knowledge-sharing, or the co-creation of ideas and resources.
  • Posters: Visual presentations that allow contributors to discuss their research, practice, project, or organisation informally with attendees.
  • Other formats: Other formats suited to the aims of the pre-conference are also welcome.

Individual presentations, posters, and other proposals submitted for a single contribution should be up to 500 words, excluding references. Pre-constituted panels, roundtables, participatory sessions, and other multi-contributor or session-based formats may be up to 800 words, excluding references. We particularly welcome formats that enable exchange and collaboration among creators, researchers, and industry professionals.

AI Use Statement: Generative AI tools may be useful for some contributors, particularly when working across languages or writing in English as an additional language. If you choose to use these tools for drafting, translation, language editing, or other parts of the submission process, please ensure that the final proposal retains your own voice, intentions, and clarity. Because generative AI can produce inaccurate, fabricated, biased, or unexpected outputs, contributors remain responsible for reviewing and verifying their submission. Please include a brief statement describing any use of generative AI in preparing the proposal.

Submissions should include:

  • Title
  • Name(s) of contributor(s)
  • Institutional affiliation or professional role, where relevant
  • Contact email address
  • Preferred contribution format
  • 3 to 5 keywords

Proposals should be submitted as a Word or PDF attachment to creatorcon@kcl.ac.uk by 23:59 GMT on 1 February 2027 with “Submission” in the subject line.

Conference Scholarships

A limited number of conference scholarships will be available to support participation in the pre-conference. Applicants who wish to be considered for a conference scholarship should submit a separate statement of no more than 200 words explaining:

  • Why financial support is needed
  • How participation in the pre-conference would contribute to their research, professional practice and/or career development.

The scholarship statement should be submitted as a Word or PDF attachment to creatorcon@kcl.ac.uk by 23:59 GMT on 1 February 2027 with “Scholarship Application” in the subject line. Scholarship applications will be assessed separately and will not affect the assessment of the proposal itself.

Estimated Timeline

Submissions open: 1 November 2026

Submissions close: 1 February 2027

Notifications of submission decision: 1 March 2027

Preliminary programme and schedule available: 1 April 2027

Pre-conference: 2 June 2027

Pre-conference Organisers

Carolina Are, The London School of Economics and Political Science

Tuğçe Bidav, King’s College London

David Craig, USC Annenberg

Tom Divon, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Jiali Fan, City St George’s, University of London

Zoë Glatt, The London School of Economics and Political Science

Paul McDonald, King’s College London

Carwyn Morris, SOAS University of London

Irida Ntalla, University of the Arts London

Jessada Salathong, Chulalongkorn University

Zoetanya Sujon, University of the Arts London

Yuqi Yang, USC Annenberg

Sponsors

King’s College London

Content Creator Scholar Network (CCSN)

References

Abidin, C. and Brown, M. L. (eds.) (2019) Microcelebrity around the globe: Approaches to cultures of internet fame. Emerald Publishing Limited.

Annabell, T. (2025) “The ideal influencer: How influencer coaches and platforms construct creators as monetizing for the right reasons,” Social Media+ Society, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051251323951

Are, C. (2026) “Flagging as a silencing tool: Exploring the relationship between de-platforming of sex and online abuse on Instagram and TikTok,” New Media & Society, 28(2), pp. 925-925.

Beacken, G. D. (2026) “Strategic visibility in precarious times: Ethnoreligious content creators and algorithmic navigation on Instagram,” New Media & Society.‏ https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448261446580

Bidav, T. (2026) “Creators beyond platforms: Belief systems across intersecting ecosystems.” Dialogues on Digital Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/29768640261471256

Bidav, T. and Mehta, S. (2024) “Peripheral Creator Cultures in India, Ireland, and Turkey,” Social Media + Society, 10(1).

Bidav, T. and Mehta, S. (eds.) (2025) Global South creator cultures. Routledge India. 

Bishop, S. (2018) “Anxiety, panic and self-optimization: Inequalities and the YouTube algorithm,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 24(1), pp. 69-84.

Bishop, S. (2025) Influencer creep: How optimization, authenticity, and self-branding transform creative culture. University of California Press.

Borchers, L. Hudders and M. Wellman (eds.) (2026) The Routledge companion to social media influencers. Routledge.

Cunningham, S. and Craig, D. (2019) Social media entertainment: The new intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. New York University Press.

Cunningham, S. and Craig, D. (eds.) (2021) Creator culture: An introduction to global social media entertainment. New York University Press. 

Divon, T., Are, C. and Briggs, P. (2025) “Platform gaslighting: A user-centric insight into social media corporate communications of content moderation,” Platforms & Society, 2.

Divon, T., Beacken, G. D., Rauchberg, J. and Maddox, J. (2026) “Jewish entrepreneurial labor TikTok: Navigating visibility, identity, and algorithmic harm,” Frontiers in Computer Science, 8.‏

Divon, T. and Eriksson Krutrök, M. (2025) “The rise of war influencers: Creators, platforms, and the visibility of conflict zones.” Platforms & Society, 2.

Duffy, B. E. and Meisner, C. (2022) “Platform governance at the margins: Social media creators’ experiences with algorithmic (in)visibility,” Media, Culture & Society, 45(2).

Duffy, B. E., Pinch, A., Sannon, S. and Sawey, M. (2021) “The Nested Precarities of Creative Labor on Social Media,” Social Media + Society, 7(2). 

Duffy, E.B. (2017) (Not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and aspirational work. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Fan, J. (2024) “In and against the platform: Navigating precarity for Instagram and Xiaohongshu (Red) influencers,” New Media & Society, 27(12), pp. 6379-6395.

Glatt, Z. (2022) “‘We’re all told not to put our eggs in one basket’: Uncertainty, precarity and cross-platform labor in the online video influencer industry,” International Journal of Communication, 16, pp. 3853–3871.

Heřmanová, M., Eriksson Krutrök, M. and Divon, T. (2026) “‘The algorithm loves the war’: ambivalent visibility in content creator practices during war,” Continuum, 40(2), pp. 160-176.‏

Hund, E. (2023) The influencer industry: The quest for authenticity on social media. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Jaramillo-Dent, D. and Latzer, M. (2026) “Exploring content creators’ belief systems within their social media ecosystems,” Dialogues on Digital Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/29768640261439170 

Maddox, J. (2026) “From dismissal to DOI: disciplining creator and influencer studies,” Creator and Influencer Studies 1(1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44538-026-00001-0

McDonald, P., Donoghue, C. B. and Havens, T. (eds.) (2021) Digital Media Distribution: Portals, Platforms, Pipelines (1st ed.). New York University Press.

Rauchberg, J. (2025) “Articulating algorithmic ableism: the suppression and surveillance of disabled TikTok creators,” Journal of Gender Studies, 34(8), pp. 1138–1149.

Stegeman, H. M., Are, C. and Poell, T. (2024) “Strategic Invisibility: How Creators Manage the Risks and Constraints of Online Hyper(In)Visibility,” Social Media + Society, 10(2).

Sujon, Z. and Ntalla, I. (2025) “Special issue introduction: Reflecting on TikTok creators and digital economies,” Continuum, 40(2), pp. 141–159. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2025.2549003

Taylor, Z. A. and Abidin, C. (2025) “Where are all the Black girls on TikTok?: Exploring in-group community and (in)visibility through #BlackGirlTikTok,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 28(5), pp. 927-946.

Yang, Y. (2026) “More than selling food: The affective labor of rural and small cities female creators in China,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 0(0).

Zhang, A. Y., Roast, A. and Morris, C. (2022) “Wanghong urbanism: Towards a new urban-digital spectacle,” Mediapolis: a Journal of Cities and Culture, 7(4).

welcome to Chamee Yang, Visiting Researcher at Department of Digital Humanities 🎊

Chamee Yang. Photo by JY Mak.

We are delighted to announce Chamee Yang (Seoul National University) who is currently visiting us as a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London.

Welcome Chamee! 🎊

Chamee Yang is Associate Professor of Communication at Seoul National University. Her research works across media history and theory, technocultural studies, and science and technology studies (STS), with a particular focus on the history and politics of “smartness” across Asian and global contexts. Her work examines how technologies become entangled with longstanding concerns around mobility, security, economy, and development, and how seemingly new technological problems are historically and socioculturally constituted. Her research has appeared in Science, Technology, & Human Values, Big Data & Society, International Journal of Communication, among other venues. She is the author of City in a Future Tense: The Making of a Smart City in South Korea (University of California Press, 2026). 

Chamee is visiting us in London as part of the K-platforms project, which is co-developing tools and methods for studying digital platforms and cultures in South Korea. This is a collaboration between the Department of Communication at Seoul National University, the School of Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences at Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) and the Centre for Digital Culture and Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London

We will be hosting a book launch for Chamee’s book on Wednesday 14th October 2026, 5-7pm. The event will also feature a preview of work from the K-platforms project with our collaborator June Jeon (KAIST), a zine on redrawing Korean media landscapes co-created with Birdcall (Seoul), and discussion and exchanges on Chamee’s research with Güneş Tavmen, Liliana Bounegru and Jonathan W. Y. Gray.

Following the growing feminist technocultures workshop with Youjin Jeon from Woman Open Tech Lab as well as events at SNU, KAIST and Birdcall, we’re keen to continue to grow connections amongst digital culture researchers, communities and spaces in London and Seoul. If this is of interest, we hope to see you on the 14th. 🍂🌕🌌✨

Research into Practice: What a day of hacking on legal search taught us

By Caitlin Wilson and Barbara McGillivray

On 16 September 2026, researchers, legal professionals, UX designers, heritage practitioners, and members of the public gathered at King’s College London for a day-long hackathon. The goal of the day was to take real tools built on real collections, find the problems users have with them, and design something better together.

The event grew out of the first couple of rounds of user research conducted during the Lost for Words project (read more about it in this blog post), a collaborative doctoral award between King’s College London and The National Archives (TNA), for which Barbara McGillivray is the principal academic supervisor. In her doctoral project, Caitlin has been researching ways in which we can improve accessibility to the Find Case Law collection through semantic search. Through the development of prototype search engines, user research has been conducted to try to understand a few questions: How do people approach a complex collection like Find Case Law when they have little to no  prior knowledge of case law? What do people actually do after they find a result? And how do we build a tool that a lay person can use, while still being useful to legal professionals? The hackathon was proposed as a research and knowledge exchange activity, bringing together people with different expertise and experiences to explore these questions and co-design potential solutions. This blog post shares the ideas that emerged from the day and highlights how collaborative events of this kind can help translate research into practical improvements for users.

In order to bring different needs into focus, we divided participants into three tracks, each centred on a different TNA collection and its associated tool. The first was Find Case Law — TNA’s service for searching and reading judgments from courts and tribunals in England and Wales — participants in this track worked with a semantic search prototype developed through Lost for Words that lets users search the collection using natural language rather than exact legal terms. The second was Legislation Chat which is an experimental tool that lets users ask questions about UK Legislation in plain English and receive answers drawn directly from the text of the law. And lastly, the Parliamentary Archives, which recently moved to its new permanent home at TNA (read more about that here), holds records of both Houses of Parliament; participants in this track worked with the Discovery catalogue and a set of records flagged during an internal project as containing potentially sensitive or outdated terminology.In the morning, participants worked through scenarios using the tools, noted where they ran into difficulty and chose a problem to address. And by mid-afternoon, groups were building solutions: some sketched interfaces, some wrote code, and others mapped user journeys or prepared design briefs. Everyone shared their work at an end-of-day show-and-tell.

What the groups built

The Find Case Law track produced two distinct prototypes. One group identified something we hadn’t named clearly before: the tool performs differently depending on how you search. Short, crisp queries like a case name or a short legal concept return good results in a way that’s already familiar from keyword search. Long, narrative queries like the kind a litigant might type when they’re describing a situation rather than naming a term work better semantically, but the interface doesn’t signal this. The proposed prototype differentiated between the two modes, expanding the search box for narrative queries, probing for clarifying details, and returning AI-generated explanations of why each case was relevant to the specific situation described. The second group focused entirely on what happens after search: the results page. Their design added a contextual sidebar pulling relevant guidance from GOV.UK, adapted dynamically to the search query. The point was to close the gap between finding a case and knowing what to do with it.

The Legislation group proposed a chatbot that would invite people to choose the role closest to their perspective — lawyer, researcher, small-business owner or member of the public — and then adapt its wording and its suggested next steps. In their live demonstration at the end of the day, the group entered the same question under four different roles. They reported how the model changed its language depending on the user with little extra prompting. The group also considered how a chatbot should handle trust and legal disclaimers. Its proposal was to explain the limits of the service, use GOV.UK visual cues, and end each conversation by directing users to a named legal charity for further advice.

The Parliamentary Archives track split into two groups, each tackling a different problem. One team built a Python-based prototype to flag potentially offensive or outdated terms in catalogue descriptions for review. It retrieved records through the TNA’s Discovery API, then checked the text in two stages: first, it looked for specified word patterns (regular expressions); second, it used a language model to sort terms into categories without examples labelled for this particular task (zero-shot classification). The prototype also scored terms for severity, historical context and confidence. It would not change catalogue records automatically: instead, it flagged records for staff review and drafted content notes for cataloguers to approve. The team also proposed a way for members of the public to report terms they encountered. The second group focused on external researchers and the language they use. For example, someone studying the decriminalisation of homosexuality may need to search for historical terms that researchers today might not think to use. The group proposed a search-expansion feature that would show related historical terms alongside results, let users choose which terms to include, and explain how the suggestions were generated.

Three findings

Looking across the discussions, three themes kept returning.

People come to collections with different needs. The hackathon groups did not identify a single interface that would work equally well for everyone, instead they all posited that interfaces and systems need to be adapted to different user needs. The Find Case Law teams, for example, proposed different ways to search and the Legislation group explored adapting responses to different user roles; while the Parliamentary Archives teams distinguished between the needs of internal staff and external researchers. A key question for development is therefore who the tool is for, and whose needs may otherwise be overlooked.

Finding a result is only half the job. Both Find Case Law groups and the Legislation Chat group identified the same gap: users arrive at a result and then don’t know what to do next, meaning that users may need guidance, support or help deciding what to do with a result. The groups saw limited signposting beyond the results they were working with. One Find Case Law team proposed a GOV.UK guidance sidebar and the Legislation Chat group proposed a referral to a legal charity where users could seek further advice. Helping users move from a result to a useful next step emerged as a common design priority.

Human review should be built in, not added as an afterthought. The Parliamentary Archives prototype was designed not to change catalogue records automatically: an archivist is required to review flagged records and approve any content notes. Other groups explored related safeguards, including explanations of why a case appeared, feedback options and routes to further advice. Across the proposals, oversight meant more than checking a system’s work; it also meant helping users understand the results and find further support.

How other heritage organisations could try this approach

A hackathon built around real collections and tasks can produce a different kind of output from a design sprint or user survey. In our experience, asking participants to try real tasks with existing tools brought specific points of difficulty into view. Asking groups to sketch or build a response then required them to make design choices, rather than offer only abstract recommendations. The result was a set of proposals that can be developed and tested at a further date; they are not evidence, by themselves, that those proposals will work.

We believe that many heritage organisations face a similar challenge. They may have extensive digital collections, yet still find it difficult to see where an interface does not meet users’ needs. Watching people try real tasks, and bringing together people who know the collections with people who use them, can help make those gaps clearer. A mixed group may also suggest approaches that no single group would reach on its own.

Taken together, the day showed the value of bringing people with different experiences together to work on real collections. The ideas developed are starting points, not finished solutions: they still need to be tested with the people who will use these tools. But one lesson was clear: improving access to digital collections starts with understanding what people are trying to do and involving them in shaping the tools that help them do it.

If you’re working on access and discovery for a heritage collection and want to know more about how we ran the day, we’d be happy to talk.

 

This event was made possible through two London Arts and Humanities Partnership initiatives: the Lost for Words collaborative doctoral project at King’s College London and The National Archives, funded through an LAHP Collaborative Doctoral Award secured by Barbara McGillivray in partnership with The National Archives, and a further LAHP Staff-led Activities Fund award supporting the hackathon.

Revolut rolls out ‘Pay with Smile’ checkouts

Revolut has begun piloting its new facial-recognition checkout system, “Pay with Smile”, allowing customers to settle bills by scanning their faces at point-of-sale terminals.

Speaking to Metro, DDH’s Prof. Btihaj Ajana warns that that Revolut’s facial-recognition payment trial turns sensitive bodily data collection into a routine commercial practice, steadily eroding consumer anonymity. Having observed the technology deployed in China, Ajana cautions that framing biometric scans as everyday convenience normalises pervasive surveillance, fosters passive compliance, and makes opting out increasingly difficult. Crucially, unlike passwords or payment cards, facial biometrics cannot be reset once compromised, leaving users permanently exposed if breaches occur.

Full Metro article is accessible here.

Seminar – Meaning What, Exactly? Measuring and Learning Lexical Meaning Across Time and Languages

Part of Computational Humanities Research Group and King’s Linguistics Network

Register here: https://forms.gle/D8Kb5xAN5GUTa55t9

Hybrid (King’s College London, Bush House (SE) 1.01 + online via MS Teams)

19 November 2026, 4-5pm GMT

Roksana Goworek (Queen Mary University of London), Meaning What, Exactly? Measuring and Learning Lexical Meaning Across Time and Languages

Abstract

How can we analyse changes in word meaning across diachronic corpora? Changes in how words are used can reflect broader shifts in language and culture, making their detection relevant to historical linguistics as well as the study of cultural and social change. Contextualised language models have enabled large-scale analysis of semantic change by representing individual word usages in a shared vector space and comparing their distributions across corpora from different time periods. This raises several methodological challenges, from deciding how sets of representations should be compared, to obtaining representations that capture sense distinctions when target-language data are scarce, to creating the high-quality annotated data needed for training and evaluation.

Different approaches to comparing distributions of word usages can produce different estimates of semantic change, and their robustness may depend on the quality and structure of the underlying representations. These issues become particularly important for languages for which suitable models, corpora, or annotated data are limited. When target-language resources are scarce, the choice of training data can influence how well models generalise to those languages.

Constructing suitable training and evaluation data presents its own difficulties. Manual word sense annotation is costly, while rare or emerging usages, which can be particularly informative for detecting changes in meaning, can be difficult to find through conventional corpus sampling. Targeted sampling can make this process more efficient, helping to construct the high-quality human-annotated resources needed to establish whether computational methods work reliably for low-resource languages.

This talk explores how choices in measurement, model training, and data annotation shape our ability to detect semantic change, and what is required to extend such research reliably to a wider range of languages. More broadly, it argues that the methods and resources underlying semantic change detection need to be scrutinised carefully if we are to make reliable claims about changes in meaning.

Bio

Roksana Goworek is a final-year PhD student at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on how language models represent meaning, with interests spanning lexical semantics, cross-lingual transfer and information retrieval. More recently, she has also worked on mechanistic interpretability, investigating how contextual information is processed and propagated through language models, including during a research internship at the Alan Turing Institute.

Quantitative Diachronic Linguistics and Cultural Analytics 2027 (QDLCA27)

We invite submissions for the second edition of the conference Quantitative Diachronic Linguistics and Cultural Analytics 2027 (QDLCA27), to be held at King’s College London (Strand Campus, WC2R 2LS, London) on 14–15 January 2027. This will be an in-person event.

Language is in constant flux, shaped by social, cultural, and cognitive forces over time. With the increasing availability of large-scale textual data and computational tools, researchers are now better equipped than ever to uncover patterns and mechanisms of language change across different linguistic areas (e.g., morphology, syntax, semantics). This conference explores the intersection of quantitative diachronic linguistics and cultural analytics, to investigate how language evolves and how these changes relate – directly or broadly – to cultural dynamics. 

We welcome contributions that engage with any aspect of historical linguistics and diachronic language analysis, provided they incorporate quantitative approaches and offer insights into the interplay between linguistic and cultural change.

Confirmed keynote speakers are Prof Dirk Geeraerts (KU Leuven) and Dr Stefania De Gaetano-Ortlieb (Saarland University).

Submission Guidelines

  • We invite abstract for 20-minute presentations, followed by 10 minutes of discussion.
  • The abstracts should be anonymised and consist of a maximum of 400 words (excluding references).
  • Please submit your abstract as a .docx file via email to: quantitative.diachronic.ling@gmail.com. Use the following subject line: “ABSTRACT Quantitative Diachronic Linguistics”

In case of a large number of high-quality submissions, some abstracts may be selected for poster presentations. Authors will be invited to indicate whether they would consider their submission suitable for a poster session, should one be included in the programme. Poster selections will be based both on authors’ preferences and on reviewers’ recommendations, as reviewers will also be asked to assess the suitability of submissions for poster presentation.

Deadline: 13 September 2026, 23:59 BST

Topics (non-exhaustive list)

Submissions may include (but are not limited to) the following areas, with no restrictions on language(s) or historical periods:

  • Quantitative studies of language change across time
  • Corpus-based analyses of language evolution
  • Computational modelling of diachronic syntax, semantics, morphology, etc.
  • Cross-linguistic comparisons using large-scale data
  • Language change in connection with historical, literary, or cultural trends
  • Digital methods for exploring linguistic and cultural shifts
  • Applications of cultural analytics to linguistic data

Important Dates:

13 September 2026: Abstract Submission Deadline

26 October 2026: Notification of Acceptance

14-15 January 2026: Conference Dates

For any inquiries, please contact the organiser, Andrea Farina (andrea.farina@kcl.ac.uk).

This conference is organised by the project COALA – Computational Corpus Annotation for Quantitative Analysis of Latin Lexical Semantics (https://coala.er.kcl.ac.uk/about/), successfully evaluated by the European Research Council and funded by UK Research and Innovation. COALA develops computational methods and corpus annotation tools for the large-scale quantitative analysis of semantic variation and change in Latin across more than two millennia of textual history. It combines advances in historical word sense disambiguation, corpus linguistics, and computational semantics to transform research on historical lexical semantics and provide new insights into how meaning changes across genres, registers, and cultural contexts over time.

Scientific Committee

Eleonora Litta (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore) 

Pierluigi Cassotti (University of Gotenburg) 

Jurica Polančec (Old Church Slavonic Institute Zagreb) 

David Goldstein (UCLA)

Alek Keersmaekers (KU Leuven)

Erin Canning (University of Oxford)

Sabine Tittel (Heidelberg University)

Luisa Miceli (University of Western Australia)

Welcome to Richard Rogers, Visiting Professor at the Department of Digital Humanities ✨

We are delighted to announce that Richard Rogers (University of Amsterdam) will be joining us as a Visiting Professor at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. In the post below he discusses his plans.

I’m very pleased to be able to join the Department of Digital Humanities over the coming period. I’ve worked closely with colleagues at King’s College London for years and look forward to further collaborations.

My main project for the visiting stint is entitled, Chatbots for internet research: a critical reflection, which is shaping up into a book. It came into being initially as tests or experiments with chatbots and ultimately have become approaches to research that supplement and extend the digital methods I’ve been working on.

Chatbots for internet research has three lines of enquiry. One is how to use chatbots for social media, search engine and other online analysis (‘internet research’) but also how to study them as media, as both a vector space medium as well as a platform. Thirdly, I’m particularly interested in those occasions when researcher and machine findings misalign and how to characterise them. Certain of these moments have to do with platform effects such as user pleasing and value alignment that produce ‘overagreement’ and a ‘bias towards neutrality’, respectively. They may have to do with limited scraping, where model responses exhibit ‘technical shallowness’. But they also arise when chatbots are asked to prove themselves and then subsequently provide bogus sources, despite the fact that they appear to produce good (synthetic) data. I characterise this occasion as ‘ungrounded performance’.

During the visiting period, I’m looking for opportunities to conduct workshops and undertake such experiments as well as other methods work. 

Richard Rogers is Professor of New Media & Digital Culture, Media Studies, and Director of the Digital Methods Initiative, Humanities Labs, University of Amsterdam. His is author or co-author of Information Politics on the Web, Digital Methods (both MIT Press) as well as Doing Digital Methods (Sage) and Digital Methods: A Short Introduction (Polity). He is editor or co-editor of The Politics of Social Media Manipulation, The Propagation of Misinformation in Social Media (both Amsterdam University Press) and Content Moderation across Social Media Platforms (Routledge). Apart from his project on chatbots for internet research, he is currently working on auditing content moderation on social media platforms, FIMI and the politics of methods as well as Wikipedia as media archaeological instrument.

A Social Critique of AI amid the Climate Crisis

by Paul Schütze

I am currently a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. As part of that visit, I recently gave a talk titled “A Social Critique of AI amid the Climate Crisis.” In that talk, I argued that AI is more than an environmentally costly technology. It is a system and an ideology that keeps extraction going and makes the current socio-economic dynamics seem inevitable. From this perspective, climate apathy is not a political failure. It is the systemic outcome of an AI-driven social order.

What I have laid out here is a pointed version of my argument, without the full theoretical scaffolding underneath it. If you are interested in the longer version, I am genuinely happy to talk through it. Please reach out!

But what does a social critique of AI actually mean?

There is a perspective on the AI-and-climate connection that most people have heard by now. Data centres consume enormous amounts of energy. Training large models releases tons of CO₂. The hardware for AI models to run on requires the mining of rare earth minerals under brutal conditions. All of this is true, and all of this is important.

But, what I call a social critique of AI goes beyond this perspective. This is because, beyond the environmental impact, there lingers an underlying question: why does any of this continue to happen? If we know the climate effects of AI (and other technologies for that matter), why do we not change it?

Simply put, the AI-and-climate connection is not an epistemological issue, it is not an issue of having too little knowledge. AI does not only have an environmental footprint problem. This would be a flaw that could be fixed with a different technological design. Run the data centres on renewable energies. Build more efficient chips. Regulate the emissions of model training. All easy solutions. Yet, while this may be helpful in some regard, these apparent solutions do not solve the underlying problem. The extractive order simply keeps going.

A social critique of AI begins by refusing this story. No better design, no further knowledge, and no greener infrastructures can get us out of this crisis. A social critique insists on looking at AI not as a technology with some negative side effects. But, it understands AI as a system embedded in a specific socio-economic order, which is built on the logics of extraction, control, and apparent efficiency. This very system will not fix the climate crisis. The climate crisis is not a malfunction of that system. It is a structural feature.

Understanding AI in terms of a social order

Once you refuse this story, and once you shift the frame, AI’s climate impact starts to look different. With this, we can now conceptualise AI as an ideological apparatus – an assemblage of stories and assumptions, of material practices and institutions – that makes the current social order feel natural and inevitable.

AI as an ideological apparatus works like this: It tells us that optimising technological systems is progress. That efficiency is inherently valuable. That data-driven decisions are superior. That technological innovation is the primary driver of human well-being. Yet, these are very specific claims that serve very specific interests. They reproduce what is already there. They make the current order feel permanent and even desirable. They make alternatives feel naive and impossible. This ideological function is what makes AI so damaging in the context of the climate crisis. AI does not just skyrocket emissions. It deepens the conditions that prevent any serious climate action.

This is the key point of a social critique of AI amid the climate crisis. We are on a trajectory toward three degrees of warming by 2050. Three degrees means ecosystem collapse, food system failure, large parts of the planet becoming uninhabitable. AI keeps these realities at bay, just enough that it does not feel necessary to actually confront this catastrophic reality.

A social critique refuses to accept that comfort. It calls out the underlying structures that produce the climate crisis. It paints AI as an integral part of these structure. It insists on facing the reality rather than retreating into the ideological narratives that make business-as-usual feel acceptable.

This is why a social critique of AI amid the climate crisis is important. The goal cannot simply be to design a better AI ethics framework or to improve the efficiency of data centres. The aim cannot be to propose the right carbon tax or the right AI regulation. But, we need to make visible the systems that keep (re)producing this outcome. We must trace how AI is embedded in and amplifies these very systems, and we thereby must refuse the stories that make all of this seem inevitable. AI is helping to build a world in which saving the planet means something entirely different from what it would actually require. Making this visible is the aim of the social critique I propose here.

New Funding Opportunity: King’s-Ramón Areces Foundation PhD Scholarship (K-FRA)

Yutong Liu & Digit / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The Department of Digital Humanities is delighted to announce a prestigious new doctoral scholarship scheme, offered in partnership with the Ramón Areces Foundation.

The King’s–Ramón Areces Foundation PhD Scholarship Programme (K-FRA) is designed to support a researcher of Spanish nationality in undertaking full-time doctoral study within our department, starting in October 2026.

A comprehensive support package

The scholarship provides an exceptional level of support over three years of research, including:

  • Full tuition fees covered for the duration of the programme
  • An annual stipend of £22,780 (including London Weighting)
  • A £1,000 annual grant for research training and related support
  • Overseas student health cover and a standard-class return airfare between London and Madrid

Research themes

We welcome applications across the full breadth of Digital Humanities. We are particularly keen to receive proposals aligned with digital methods and cultural heritage, computational humanities and cultural AI, digital identities or governance, including projects that apply digital tools within the arts or wider cultural sectors.

As Paul Spence, Reader in Digital Humanities, notes:

The King’s-Ramón Areces PhD Scholarship Programme enables outstanding researchers to pursue innovative, internationally oriented doctoral work, strengthening long-standing academic links between UK and Spanish digital humanities researchers.

Key dates and how to apply

Application closing date: 13 February 2026.

To support prospective applicants, we will be hosting an online information session on 12 January, from 15.00 to 16.00 (UK time). To register your interest and receive access details, please complete the online registration form.

The session will provide further information about the programme, the application process, and the specific terms and conditions set by the Ramón Areces Foundation.

Find out more

For full eligibility criteria and detailed application instructions, please visit the official page of the King’s–Ramón Areces Foundation PhD Scholarship Programme (K-FRA).

Best overall student in MA Digital Humanities, 2024-2025

Congratulations to Kesara Ariyapongpairoj for being awarded “Best Overall Student in the MA Digital Humanities” in 2024-2025. 🎊

Kesara is a MA Digital Humanities graduate from King’s College London with a background in Philosophy. Her research focuses on how digital media and emerging technologies have transformed the production and dissemination of information, and the socio-political and cultural impact of online narratives in shaping belief systems and ideologies.

Continue reading “Best overall student in MA Digital Humanities, 2024-2025”