Language Models as Measurement Apparatus for Culture
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. ...
| Authors | Kent K. Chang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 2 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 July 2026 |
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