We are excited to announce that three projects from the Information and Communication Technology 2023 (ICT) call “Digital Humanism” by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) have been selected for funding!

The projects that have been selected are:

• Julia Neidhardt’s project “Disentangling effects of digitization on linguistic diversity”. Julia will be working on this project together with Andreas Baumann and Hannes Fellner (both from the University of Vienna)
• “Acquiring and explaining norms for AI systems” by Agatha Ciabattoni, who will be working together with John Horty (University of Maryland) and Cristinel Mateis (AIT - Austrian Institute of Technology)
• “Citizen-centered democratic innovation: Understanding citizen preferences for participatory budgeting algorithms” by Jan Maly, who will be joined by Carolina Plescia (University of Vienna)

The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) 2023 Call „Digital Humanism” invited scientists to conduct interdisciplinary research between the social sciences, humanities and computer sciences/ICT that address digital technologies and practices from a human-centered and societal perspective in the field of Digital Humanism. Together, the projects are funded with over 1.5 million Euros.

Disentangling effects of digitization on linguistic diversity

About 7000 languages are spoken around the globe, constituting a remarkable extent of linguistic and cultural diversity. However, research has shown that linguistic diversity has decreased through the past couple of decades and is vanishing rapidly, an observation that cannot simply be pinpointed to a single factor. Large-scale studies on language endangerment and linguistic diversity have already accounted for environmental and socio-economic effects. The project “Disentangling effects of digitization on linguistic diversity” adds to this research by considering the effect of digitization on linguistic diversity. The approach of the project unfolds in three work packages. In the first one, the effects of measures associated with digitization on linguistic diversity in the non-digital sphere are studied. Country-level estimates of digitization, linguistic diversity, and other covariates, are correlated, crucially also considering the diachronic dimension. In the second work package, the project focuses on linguistic diversity in the digital sphere. Country-level estimates of linguistic diversity based on social-media data and a diachronically layered web corpus are derived, so that developments of digital linguistic diversity can be examined on a global scale. In the third work package, the project zooms into a constrained region, Québec (CA). In a mixed-methods approach, the project investigates the relationship between digitization and linguistic diversity in that region by exploiting regional (digital) data and results from a qualitative survey on language choice and attitudes.

About Julia Neidhardt

Julia Neidhardt is a researcher at the Research Unit Data Science with a background in mathematics and computer science. She was a guest researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences as well as visiting scholar at Northwestern University, USA, and at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Her research focuses on user modeling and recommender systems in tourism and in the news domain, and on developing approaches to capture online opinion-forming and online behavior. In her research, she also focuses on Digital Humanism. Her research is published in highly renowned conference proceedings and journals including Nature Human Behaviour. She is regularly invited to give talks on topics related to her research, among others at the Oxford Women in Computer Science - Distinguished Speaker Series at the University of Oxford. Julia Neidhardt is a senior program committee member of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys) and is an associate editor of the Journal of Information Technology & Tourism as well as a distinguished reviewer of the newly established journal ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems (TORS). She is research track co-chair of ACM UMAP 2023, ENTER 2019 and ENTER 2020, and a co-organizer of a number of workshops and conferences. Julia Neidhardt is part of the Digital Humanism Initiative at TU Wien and board member of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (CAIML). She leads the Christian Doppler Lab for Recommender Systems and since 2023, she also holds the UNESCO Co-Chair on Digital Humanism.

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