A Seamless Graft?

Considering the integration of language and literacy scholars into data-driven companies

Conference paper presented at The Canadian Society for the Study of Education, 2023.

Abstract:

During this talk, I offered a case study about the conditions for, and outcomes of building a bridge between technical knowledge and social awareness within a data-driven company in the private sector through creating and implementing a carefully curated linguistic corpus. By describing the interdisciplinary and collaborative process behind the design and implementation of a search and recommendation algorithm based on linguistic input, this presentation offered insight into the nature of Humanities and Social Science research in general (and literacy education in specific) outside of academia and its potential place in data-driven organizations, while demystifying the nature of algorithms. This presentation shed some light on potentially transferable skills between Ph.D. studies and the private sector and attempted to bring some degree of confidence to upcoming scholars in their ability to integrate into such environments.