Bríd-Áine Parnell

I'm investigating how text encoding in online webforms is embedding error in data systems and digital identities by failing to accurately represent names outside of the Anglosphere. Many webforms don't take diacritical marks (so-called ‘special characters’ like the Irish síneadh fada or the French circumflex), so users have to perform an anglicisation of their name in order to gain access to digital services, stripping out the accents so that their name is “acceptable” to the system. This is a racial microaggression, a systematic cultural erasure that is lodged in the infrastructure of layered technology systems, where the capabilities of the cutting edge are limited by the affordances of the foundations.

My research aims to highlight the social impacts of name misrepresentation on culture and identity, linking these to current discourse on data colonialism, linguistic imperialism and techno-solutionism. It also examines the potential technological impacts, including the errors of today and potential representational and cultural bias in the NLP-enabled systems of tomorrow.

The findings of this project are expected to offer new insights into social and cultural harms hidden within modern data infrastructures, the technological obstacles to effective and efficient natural language processing, and how these two issues intersect. I hope they will be useful to academics considering the social and ethical impacts of natural language processing, and those who work in multilingual NLP and digital access issues. In a wider context, the research should be helpful to developers, designers and policymakers involved in decision-making around the implementation of new technologies and the adoption of text encoding standards.

• Jones, B., Strait, A., Parnell, B.-A., Horzyk, A. M., & Perez, J. (2025). Journalism and generative AI: data, deals and disruption in the news media. Zenodo. (DOI)

  The findings from a workshop exploring the issues arising from AI companies’ use of news as data for training and grounding AI systems.

• Parnell, B-Á. (2025). The Tourist, TEXT Prose and Poetry, 29 (1), pp. 12-21. (DOI)

  A short story that was both an experiment in co-creation with computational and generative methods, and a response to UK policy on AI.

• 2025

  • 10th STS Italia Conference "Technoscience for Good"

    From Determinism to Dystopia: Industry-Driven Narratives and the EU AI Act

  • 4S 2025 Conference: Reverberations

    Fighting for the Fada: Digital Misrepresentation and Cultural Erasure in Ireland's Online Systems

My masters' thesis asks if the narratives that surround AI as a technology, in media reports, interviews and even submissions of evidence to the EU Commission, could have influenced how policymakers thought about what they needed to regulate and how they would do it. In particular, prevailing stories that AI will definitely progress until it reaches general intelligence, that it will lead to either utopia or dystopia, and that it's a zero-sum game, if 'we' don't get there first, someone else wil reap the rewards.