Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture - Hardcover

Li, Xiaochang

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226837017 ISBN 13: 9780226837017

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2026

Synopsis

A revealing and surprising origin story, showing how attempts to render human speech and language computable led from the era of big data to today’s AI.
 
Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In this eye-opening book, technology expert Xiaochang Li shows readers how that dream both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for today’s generative AI. With original research and clear explanations, Li elucidates the origins of what’s known as natural language processing (NLP) and the heated twentieth-century debates between computer scientists, linguists, and communication engineers that shaped today’s technology. Starting with early devices that recorded, analyzed, and attempted to interpret human speech, she demonstrates how computer speech recognition, particularly efforts led by Bell Labs and IBM, advanced technology by deemphasizing linguistic meaning in favor of statistical prediction. In other words, researchers gradually abandoned systems that sought to understand human language, opting instead for work-arounds that simply predicted patterns in speech and text data. That solution became incredibly and surprisingly adaptable. As Li reveals, transforming linguistic questions into engineering ones ushered in the routine operation of search engines, spam filters, and the varied content sorting and recommendation mechanisms that regulate the access, circulation, and legitimacy of information across every platform. But this has all come at the cost of forever requiring copious and ever-growing amounts of new data.
 
At its core, Divination Engines illuminates how the artifacts of human communication―speech, text, and images―have become both the fodder for and products of computers. This connection between communication and computation, Li shows, has given rise to data-driven analytics, machine learning, and today’s algorithmic culture.

About this title

About the Author

Xiaochang Li is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University and an affiliate faculty member in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society and the Program in Modern Thought and Literature.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226837017
• ISBN 13: 9780226837017
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320