Keynote speakers

INFuture conference will have a line-up of international keynote speakers discussing this year's theme "Knowledge in the Digital Age".

Language in the Age of Dataism

Špela Vintar (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)

The digital age brings dramatic changes to language and communication, its effects can be seen in the ways we use language, the channels we use to communicate and the manners in which ideas are spread. From the other end of the spectrum, our linguistic behaviour, communications and knowledge are transformed into data which can be used or monetized to feed intelligent technologies. The lecture will present a bird's eye view of this dynamics of change, first by focusing on the impact of digitisation on language itself, further by analysing current trends in the language industry where traditional services are being replaced by technology- and data-driven solutions, and finally by objectifying the impact of these technologies on man and society at large. We make a case for digital linguistics as an interdisciplinary field of study which adopts a human-centred approach to the sociolinguistic, technological, economic, infrastructural and ethical issues emerging with regard to language in the digital age.

Co-creating Digital Heritage: what is the impact of cooperation and re-use?

Pierluigi Feliciati (University of Macerata, Italy)

Digital heritage is obviously connected with the conception and expression of culture. The Convention of Faro emphasizes the participation and responsibility of heritage communities and opens up for us the challenge of creating, managing and maintaining the digital ecosystems where people may actively access and participate to cultural life. Among the first experiences of digital co-creation and participation, the Wikipedia utopia of building a global ecosystem for collective intelligence had turned into a robust and widely-estimated project, crucial for the Web of Data (and for search engines). If we are all living onlife, it is worth for us scholars to give a special attention to the phenomenon of participative creation and re-use of digital culture, studying the quality and the value of digital assets, users’ behaviors and satisfaction against digital infrastructures, the commercial production chains and tendencies, the strategies of policy makers. The epochal importance (and the economic value) of crowdsourcing, co-creation and participation have to be supported and evaluated systematically, considering their cultural, social and technological impact.