The Designing Responsible NLP CDT is training the next generation of researchers and innovators in designing responsible and trustworthy natural language processing. Supporting diverse and inclusive practices and ensuring we engage people from a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences is central to this mission – and a key aspect of being responsible in our practices and the work we champion. With this in mind, last year we opened our Global Majority Fellowship call, to bring one exceptional researcher from the global majority to Edinburgh to be based at the CDT, working and engaging with the community of students and researchers around it. The focus of this first call was Responsible NLP and Digital Cultural Heritage.
Following a competitive process, we were delighted to welcome Jean Linis-Dinco as our first Global Majority Fellow. Jean joined us here at the Edinburgh Futures Institute in January, to progress her work with digital archives of documents around the American colonialism of The Philippines, and particularly the language of colonialism.
Jean’s project uses Natural Language Processing techniques to investigate how ideological rhetoric was deployed in American colonial discourse on the Philippines, and provides a multi-step, scalable, reproducible framework for mapping imperial rhetoric used to legitimise domination. She operationalises concepts from post-colonial critique within a machine learning pipeline, which she hopes will yield substantive insights into the architecture of empires.
In this very personal guest blog post, Jean highlights how the personal is the political. These archive materials are not just historical, they capture lives, experiences, and cultural legacies that continue to shape the lives and experiences of individuals today – and which NLP can help us to navigate, analyse and reflect upon.
‘Be good, my child’
I was six when I first saw a woman leave. She stood there in a humble living room, wearing a denim jacket, holding a small Manila envelope containing her passport and plane ticket. The room felt heavy with inconsolable sadness, for which no one seemed to have words. There was this aching desire to freeze time to stretch that moment a little bit longer. Just a little bit. The woman turned to me with grains of tears clung to her eyes, stubborn yet still, as her mouth held a delicate smile.
‘Anak, magbabait ka ha.’ Be good, my child. That was the first time I saw my mother cry.
My story is a story of migration. Not the kind that leaves you with butterflies in your stomach. It was the kind that leaves a space at the dining table where someone once sat, yet kind enough to give you a flicker of hope in the dark. It was the kind that tells a six-year-old that this is what love means. She leaves, so I could live.
That scene would be repeated in different homes, with different faces, over and over, as if it were a ritual that we all know by heart. We are all trapped in this loop, and there seems to be no escape. Every working-class Filipino family has a foot or two outside the Philippines. If it was not a mother in Dubai, it was a father in Riyadh or a sister in Kuwait, all working to earn foreign currency that could stretch a little further than anything earned back home. Some may get lucky and can head home after a few years with savings in hand, maybe enough to build a small house in their hometown. But for most, when luck turns its back, it can take 26 years or even longer, and there is still nothing to show for it.
I thought I escaped this reality until I found myself boarding my first flight out of the country. Suddenly, the scene in the living room would flash again, except this time, I was the one leaving. Migration is the structure upon which all my work is anchored. It is the foundation of my life, forming my family, the choices I have made, and the path I have taken to get where I am now. And as I find myself writing this piece in a cold Scottish winter night, with a fellowship in one hand and an archive of conquest in another, I cannot help but wonder if I ever really left that living room at all. When I applied for this fellowship, I was asked what I hoped to gain from it. My only answer was time. Time to think, to write and to sit with ideas which followed me across borders. Because for so long, I have been deprived of this. When your idea of a good life is formed by migration and mobility, even your time is never really yours; it is nothing but a borrowed concept, something that feels so near yet so far. Your life is measured in contracts and in visa applications that treat you like an object stripped of privacy just for a minuscule chance of a yes. Your whole life is reduced to documents that can be stamped, delayed or denied. Thus, stillness and rest feel indulgent when your survival has always depended on motion.
I came to Edinburgh to work on an NLP pipeline to study the American conquest of the Philippines, to trace patterns of how Filipinos who had already fought one coloniser were recasted as incapable of self-rule. The conquest that dissolved our aspirations for freedom and labelled them as an impossible dream. The same conquest that made the Philippines a US colony for forty-eight years and paved the way for the very foundations of the socio-economic order that pushes people to leave. It has been particularly unsettling to read, as it forced me to recognise that what I am studying in these archives is not distant history. They form part of a living structure that reaches into my everyday. Even though the Americans left on paper, they remained in our military bases, in our classrooms, in our economy and in our belief that everything from the outside is better. This is the language of empire speaking, a deafening whisper that makes you question your anger. It survives rarely through force, but often by virtue of quiet repetition of its own logic until you realise one day that you start speaking it, too.
From the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association to the postwar nursing programmes, American imperialism built a system that positioned Filipinos as a mobile labour reserve for globalisation. Even after formal independence, the same mechanisms reappeared in various training programmes that sought to produce a feminised, English-speaking, cheap workforce for export. Imperialism produced the conditions under which migration became an economic policy, a culture and a moral expectation. It created the system that took my mother across the ocean to become a maid and take care of someone else’s child.
Whilst I study war from century-old papers, it is never divorced from contemporary reality. Reading them as just some part of history is futile, as their impact reverberates hundred years later. This archive explains why migration remains an inevitable concept for Filipino families, why, for most of us, survival is always outside, always unreachable. The living room and the war archives are part of the same record. Both tell the story of an empire that insists on surviving, long after it claims to have left. And it is at this point where my mother’s words, ‘Anak, magbabait ka ha’ become a record of that empire, too.
Jean Linis-Dinco is the recipient of the Global Majority Fellowship. Her project uses Natural Language Processing techniques to investigate how ideological rhetoric was deployed in American colonial discourse on the Philippines. Jean’s project provides a multi-step, scalable, reproducible framework for mapping imperial rhetoric used to legitimise domination. She operationalises concepts from post-colonial critique within a machine learning pipeline, which she hopes will yield substantive insights into the architecture of empires.