DECA: Democratic epistemic capacities in the age of algorithms

© 2023 The authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 licence, no derivative works, attribution, CC-BY-ND. DECA: Democratic epistemic capacities in the age of algorithms Maarit Koponen Mary Nurminen Nina Havumetsä Juha Lång University of Eastern Finland firstname.lastname@uef.fi Abstract The DECA project consortium investigates epistemic capacities, defined as an individ- ual’s access to reliable knowledge, their abil- ity to participate in knowledge production, and society’s capacity to make informed, sus- tainable policy decisions. In this paper, we fo- cus specifically on the parts of the project ex- amining the challenges posed by multilin- guality in these processes and the potential role of MT in supporting access to, and pro- duction of, knowledge. 1 Background The expanding role of algorithms in processes of information production and reception poses challenges to trust, security, equality and ultimately, societal sustainability. The project consortium “Democratic epistemic capacity in the age of algorithms” (DECA) brings together researchers from media, communication and journalism research, translation studies, social psychology, sociology, computer science and law to address these questions. The DECA consortium is formed by the University of Helsinki (consortium coordinator), the University of Eastern Finland, Tampere University, Aalto University and the Finnish Youth Research Society and funded (2022–2025) by the Strategic Research Council established within the Academy of Finland. The key concept forming part of the project name, epistemic capacity, can be defined in different ways (cf. Werkheiser, 2016). On the one hand, it can be seen as an individual’s access and exposure to reliable knowledge, their right to be recognised and repre- sented, and their ability to participate in knowledge production. On a broader societal level, it refers to a society’s capacity to make informed, sustainable pol- icy decisions. Through work packages examining reliable knowledge, misinformation, societal trust and dis- trust, and barriers to epistemic capabilities from dif- ferent perspectives, DECA aims to promote access to reliable knowledge and facilitate an understanding of how existing social inequalities intersect with epis- temic capabilities. Vital components in building epistemic capacity and participating in the functioning of society include the abilities to access understandable information and communicate with other members of society. Modern societies are increasingly multilingual, but official in- stitutions and language policies generally do not ac- count for this linguistic diversity. In practice, knowledge and information is only available in na- tionally recognised official languages and possibly some lingua franca such as English. This creates bar- riers to linguistic accessibility (see e.g. Hirvonen and Kinnunen, 2021) and excludes many members of so- ciety, limiting their epistemic capacities (e.g. Mow- bray, 2017). Potential solutions to the problem may be offered by machine translation (MT). A growing body of re- search shows that migrants often turn to MT in their daily lives to read information that is not otherwise accessible to them (e.g., Ayvazyan and Pym, 2018; Ciribuco, 2020). Various governmental and non-gov- ernmental institutions have also explored the use of MT as a tool for increasing linguistic accessibility (Nurminen and Koponen, 2020), and recent proposals suggest …

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