🤖 AI Summary
This study challenges the prevailing view of language models as passive recorders of cultural phenomena, arguing instead that they function as active apparatuses that co-constitute cultural reality. Drawing on Karen Barad’s concept of “agential cuts” and adopting a material-discursive perspective, the research integrates natural language processing, qualitative analysis, and apparatus critique—illustrated through case studies such as film and television dialogue—to uncover the entanglements inherent in how models delineate cultural boundaries. Emphasizing ethical and theoretical reflexivity in methodological choices for cultural measurement, the work proposes a new paradigm that is both culturally sensitive and theoretically grounded. It further demonstrates how current model designs often erase cultural markers and diminish historical sensitivity, thereby shaping—and potentially distorting—the production and interpretation of cultural structures.
📝 Abstract
Language models are increasingly used to quantify cultural phenomena, but what makes such measurement distinctively cultural? This paper argues that NLP work on culture is a material-discursive practice: the apparatus -- model, data, annotation, evaluation -- participates in constituting the cultural reality it measures, rather than passively recording it. Drawing on Karen Barad's concept of the agential cut -- the contingent boundary between phenomenon and instrument -- I show that the apparatus's substantive design choices draw such boundaries, and that the boundary is entangled from the start because language models have already internalized much of the cultural material they measure. I illustrate this through three case studies on television and film dialogue (measuring structure, interaction, and deviation) and three examinations of the apparatus itself (erasure of cultural markers, attunement to historical material, and agency in an agentic workflow). This big picture analysis proposes a research program that is theory-driven, empirically rigorous, and culturally contingent, treating each agential cut as a conscious commitment, at once methodological and ethical.