By Sally O'Brien
Clark English MA Alumni Emily McGinn recently published an article in the journal Including Disability. The journal examines large scale social, technological, cultural and legal barriers faced by those with disabilities and innovative approaches to eliminating these barriers. Emily McGinn’s article, “Altered Voice, Altered Humanness” focuses on voice-activated technology and how it has created a new hierarchy where “perfect” computer produced speech is considered more authentic than some natural human speech, and how this leaves people with disabilities, accents, or speech differences at a disadvantage.
She traces a long history of how speech has always been used to define “full” humanity in a way that often excludes disabled people, and how these historical exclusions continue with technology today. Voice assistants like Alexa and Siri have a 90–95% accuracy rate with typical speech, but only 50–60% with dysarthric voices, largely because disabled voices are underrepresented in training data.
In the article, McGinn ties in her own experience developing a motor speech disorder called dysarthria which made her rethink her entire academic identity as someone passionate about language. She advocates for recentering human variability in how we think about language and design technology and calls to reject the idea that non-standard speech is “broken” or in need of fixing.
Read the abstract of her article here: Voice activated devices reinforce the philosophical concept of the animating power of speech that delineates human from animal, yet these devices are interpreted by machines. Our contemporary moment has reified voice in privileging the perfect, the mechanical over the varied, accented, messy, human produced speech. Therefore, these devices render a disabled, an accented, or a varied voice is rendered as less authentic, less human, than what can be produced algorithmically. The technological has philosophically replaced the divine. Recentering the human in all of its forms in the face of artificial verisimilitude requires a more inclusive mode of thinking about language.
Since her time at Clark, Emily has developed a career centered around literature and the digital humanities. She is currently a Digital Humanities specialist with the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University. Previously, she served as the Humanities Computing Curriculum Specialist at Princeton University, within the Center for Digital Humanities, and as the Head of Digital Humanities at the University of Georgia. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, and her research centers on literary modernism and gramophones.
