Xiaochang Li, "Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Xiaochang Li, "Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

B2Upper-intermediateSeptember 2, 202640 min

Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. 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, Dr. 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 attemp...

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0:00

Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Xiao-Chang Li about a book just out in 2026 from the University of Chicago Press titled Divination

0:19

Engines, Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic culture, which really in many ways takes us through the history of kind of where we're at today in many senses, where we talk about things like natural language processing and large language models and artificial intelligence, way more in the everyday than perhaps computer

0:41

scientists would have predicted even five years ago, much less longer than that. But as much as we might think we're familiar with these ideas, and maybe we are in terms of how they work now, how we got to this place is maybe a lot less clear. And that's exactly what this book helps us understand. Why is it that we're talking about natural

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