By Nichole Nomura and Quinn Dombrowski
Introduction
“Computer, count some words”
“The computer” – a character unnamed save its technological form – is one of the most enduring characters of Star Trek, spanning multiple generations of hardware and software over a 250-year period ranging from Enterprise in the 2150s to Picard in 2399. The prominence of the computer as an information agent, and the repeated deployment of “the archive” as a mysterious space of potential discovery[1] has the effect of overshadowing a more familiar figure from our own era: the librarian. In this article, we take the librarian as the starting point for understanding the information landscape of Star Trek. What, in the universes of Star Trek, do librarians do, and how do those activities relate to the scope of librarianship in the real 21st century? We find the visible librarian pushed into a stereotyped corner, where a large swath of activities associated in particular with modern data librarians simply disappear from view. In this future landscape, it is as if data organizes itself – or at least, we are led to assume as much. We see the utopian embodiment of this process through Data, who both has access to these vast knowledge stores, and a positronic brain to deploy that data and interact with the world at a level where he is deemed sentient. But another form that data takes is “the computer”, which is narratively relegated to the background as a service worker, however complex that service may be upon closer interrogation. As one of the services computers perform, often hyper-invisibly, in the Star Trek universe is translation, we conclude with a case study of how translation depends not only on advanced computation, but an enormous amount of data – including cultural and linguistic information we might assume resists datafication. We pair examples from a few novels with a corpus of 774 Star Trek novels, using digital humanities text analysis methods to draw together those examples – much as one might do by calling upon the computer.
Are there librarians in Star Trek’s vision of the future?
In the universe of the Star Trek novels, there aren’t very many librarians. Text-mining a corpus of 774 Star Trek novels ranging from 1967-2022 reveals that “librarian” only appears in 5% of the novels, with only four texts[2] mentioning a librarian five or more times. Some of these one-off references simply use “librarian” as a rhetorical device[3] or draw upon stereotypes for easy comic effect[4]. Others, however, provide world-building information about the role of librarians. We find a description of Lilian Coates as both the librarian and the chief administrator of the school in a colony[5] – which both downplays the amount of work involved in either of those roles (each referred to as “a career” in the novel), and accurately depicts the multiple hats librarians often take on, especially when budgets are constrained (see, for example, Lotts 2020). There are numerous references to “the ship’s librarian,” spanning multiple ships and civilizations, although the responsibilities of this role are usually not clearly depicted. The ship’s librarian can most often be found staffing physical spaces[6], enforcing quiet rules[7] and closing times[8].
Outside of the ship, references to librarians in other institutional contexts shed more light on the role that librarians are imagined to play in this future. In reference to an incident of computer data loss, it is noted that “the Federation’s librarians and computer technicians have learned a lot from this mistake” – suggesting that there remains some differentiation between the job responsibilities of “librarians” and “computer technicians,” though where that line may be drawn is unclear. Are these computer technicians responsible for the physical hardware, or do their responsibilities extend into a broader range of software as well as archival data management, as we see in library technical services in the 2020s? Memory Prime (Judith and Garfield Reeve-Stevens, 1988) gestures towards the data librarian roles that would become more prominent in the decades following the book’s publication, and offers one of very few explicit references to the work that goes into data curation:
“Historical data, especially that collected from the innumerable lost probes sent out during the initial haphazard expansion of the Federation, were still being tracked down on a hundred worlds, from antique databanks and collections of actual physically printed materials, for reintegration into the central dataweb. The reconstruction project was years from completion, and librarian technicians such as Romaine feared that some data had been lost forever.”
In Rosetta (Dave Stern, 2006), Hoshi Sato visits a VR representation of the Kanthropian database, depicted as “a huge room with vaulted ceilings, classical Greek columns, long wooden tables, and aisle after aisle after aisle of books, stretching as far as she could see. Out into infinity.” This trope of the library as a mysterious ornate space that prioritizes the storage of books commonly appears across media (e.g. Bukoff 1999), and is one that librarians have fought against since the late 20th century (Choy & Goh 2016). Seeing its continued resonance in the 22nd century is disheartening. The holographic librarian in this space likewise embodies tropes of librarians as stuffy gatekeepers (Radford and Radford, 2001), “wearing an old-fashioned suit and tie” and smiling “reproachfully” as he interrupts Sato’s browsing to inform her that “Access to these resources is forbidden for civilizations at level-four development.”
Librarians take on a cultural steward role beyond that of gatekeeping (Gorman 2000, Greenstein 2004) when tasked with seeding or preserving society. In Diane Duane’s The Romulan Way, a set of ships “crammed full of technical information in every field known to the Vulcans” left the Vulcan homeworld, staffed by “Ships’ librarians [who] were aware that they were stocking ‘time capsules’,” that would seed the Romulan civilization. Likewise, the androids of Spartacus make space for a library on their escape craft, containing “seven thousand years of history, philosophy, literature, poetry, mechanics, engineering, and science,” with “salvaged replicas” of the art destroyed in the war. The ship’s Captain tells Data and Riker “With this library, we can remember where we are from and who we are, no matter where we settle.”
Spartacus places data and cultural heritage stewardship at the heart of its conflict. Picard must arbitrate between a ship of androids who’ve escaped a planet after a bloody rebellion and a ship of organic humanoids who claim that ship as their property. While the androids are programmed for combat and their engineers prepare for what they believe to be their final battle, the librarian, Maran, prepares for something beyond it, giving Data their “race bank,” “a master design program, a controlling list of who and what we are” in the hopes that their species may be rebuilt. When the battle is averted through an application for Federation membership, Data returns the race bank, repatriating the data[9].
While there are relatively few librarians in Star Trek’s future, the universe is deeply saturated with information and information agents– most novels contain either an archive, a computer, a librarian, or some combination of them. Archives and librarians rarely appear in texts without computers. Archives appear in 10% of novels, twice as frequently as librarians. A thorough investigation of the depiction of these archives – what they contain, how they are managed, and how users interact with them – is outside the scope of this paper. While the Star Trek universe makes it easy to gloss over the differences between libraries and archives (e.g. one notes the similarities between Sato’s VR trip to the “Kanthropian database” library and numerous scenes involving “the archives”), “librarian” and “archivists” are distinct professional identities in our universe, and here we choose to focus on the former.
Fig. 1: Star Trek novels referencing the computer, the archive, and/or librarian, 1967-2022
Fig. 2: Percentage of Star Trek referencing the computer, the archive, and/or librarian, per decade (1960-2020)
What kind of information work do computers do in the future?
The computer, omnipresent in the implied, always-running and often always-listening background of Federation starships, is almost ubiquitous in our corpus, with 93% of texts containing at least one instance of the word. The ship’s computer’s roles in knowledge curation and presentation serve more often than not as background to the plot, enabling, rather than constituting, the key questions of the narrative. Because of this “background” nature–one in which there are many references, perhaps unremarkable in themselves, but which might reveal some interesting patterns when taken together–we’ve turned to computational methods that excel at noticing things at scales bigger than most human readers can hold in working memory. Through these patterns, we seek in particular to identify spaces within the information landscape where the computer fills roles that are within the scope of the 21st century librarian.
While the many authors who’ve contributed to the written universe of Star Trek have their own unique styles, interests, and concerns within that universe, reference to the same authoritative TV and movies creates some structural similarities across the corpus. One of those structural consistences is the pattern “Computer, followed by a speech tag and a command, or directly by a command, which is the stylized, and trend-setting, wakeword for Federation starship computers. To identify these occurrences, we wrote a Python script[10] that parsed each book into its constituent sentences, and used regular expressions (a common kind of syntax for pattern matching) to identify sentences that included a capitalized Computer, and extracted the word that immediately followed, skipping any intervening speech tag (e.g. “said Picard”). This script produced a spreadsheet that we could then enrich with metadata about the associated book, such as title, author, series, and publication date, to enable counting and visualizing our results in various ways.
Over the course of the 774 novels in our corpus, characters directly address a computer, usually the ship’s computer, with “Computer, 1707 times. Some of these begin long, multi-command exchanges, others, exchanges as short as “Computer, what time is it?”. Occasionally, the wakeword goes unanswered, revealing damage, malfunction, or perhaps a loss of command privileges.
The computer is simultaneously the access point to all the institutionally sanctioned knowledge that the characters have access to and the interface to the complex control systems on starships. While it lacks the positronic brain that imbues Data with sentience, it has much of the same information contained in Data’s mind, in addition to many tremendously complex algorithms for interpreting requests and turning single-word orders (such as “analyze”) into processes of computational analysis, making plausible choices among numerous finely-nuanced options along the way. In practice, the request “analyze this data” can result in wildly divergent results, as the person tasked with implementing the analysis is confronted with a barrage of choices starting from the actual goal of this analysis, weighing pros and cons of different tools and methods for accomplishing that goal, and then adjusting various parameters and options associated with each possible method – all of which are consequential for the results. Despite the many decisions entailed by “analyze,” starship crews are generally comfortable leaving this entire process up to the computer, who simply does it to the satisfaction of the requestor. This is possibly one of the most science-fictional features of the ship’s computer: today, even the most skilled coder-librarian would not be able to successfully implement this request without ongoing consultation with the requestor. It is tempting to imagine that in the future, some of these complex analyses have become so standardized as to render them more akin to a request like “count the words in this document”, which is also more nuanced than meets the eye (e.g. are hyphenated words a single unit?), but many of those decisions could be eliminated through the adoption of a standard set of practices within a community. However, it is also not difficult to imagine a darker scenario more akin to our contemporary reality, where impressive feats of “AI” decision-making have been revealed to be nothing more than poorly-compensated yet remarkably-skilled human laborers behind the scenes, like those providing annotation date for large-language models. We can also imagine a world in which “analyze” replicates a history of analysis we do not want to replicate– perhaps racially-biased methods are encoded into training data or programs– yet these biases are kept largely invisible because the computer does not provide a Methods section alongside the results.
Fig. 3: Most frequent words following “Computer/Data, …”, color-coded by addressee
While the source of the computer’s analytic capabilities could be interpreted through either an exceedingly advanced technological lens or a dystopian lens of a data-underclass, Data is unambiguously portrayed as an autonomous being. The gap in physicality between the computer and Data becomes manifest in the way that other characters engage with them. Where the computer is treated as a service worker and utility, Data is regarded as a proper interlocutor, worthy of explanation, hypotheticals, and discussion. Comparing “Computer, …” to “Data, …” computationally is challenging, since they are not always used in identical ways. Not all utterances to Data begin with his name, which can also appear mid-sentence. Even with these caveats, we see distinctive patterns in what people request of these two entities. The computer – exclusively – is told to “end”, “halt”, “run”, and “resume” programs; “locate” people and things; “display”, “show”, “pause”, and “freeze” images; and “play” video. Without so much as a verb, people command “lights!” or ask “time?”. “Deactivate” and “activate” are also almost the sole purview of the computer, and the computer is commonly the agent told to “access” data. Most of these interactions are tied to the visible form of the computer: its screens and holograms, and its intermingling with the electronic nervous system of the ship. On occasion it is asked to identify something through the question “what” (quite often some form of, “what time is it?”), interrogated about a process with “how”, or asked to locate something with “where”, but “who” and “why” are rarely asked of the computer.
In contrast, “who” and “why” are questions that Data commonly is called upon to answer – and questions introduced by “what” are less factual and more nuanced: “What do you….”, “What about…”, etc. Similarly, “are”, “was”, “do”, and “have” are the lead-in to more complex inquiries. When directed towards the computer, “this” is most often a lead-in to an authentication protocol for a restricted command, e.g. “Computer, this is Captain Benjamin Sisko. Play eyes-only message from Starfleet Command.”[11] For Data, there are a much wider range of uses, including introductions (“Data, this is Lieutenant Rhea McAdams, our new head of security”[12]) appeasement (“Data, this is all very helpful, but did Captain Picard ask you to put it together?”[13]), and where it is used to specify the speaker’s identity, it is not for purposes of a power play but as a way to re-establish contact after a connection loss (“Data, this is Geordi. Is everybody all right?”[14]). Data is enlisted in thinking through hypotheticals with “if”, and provided with additional context with “it” and “as”. Finally, while the roughly even split in “please” superficially suggests equal footing between Data and the computer with regard to politeness rhetoric, across the larger corpus we find that a single “please” is, in fact, a fairly brusque way to introduce a request. Only Data is the recipient of a more common politeness strategy: using the phrase “could you / we”. The only use of “could” with the computer is an information request[15].
When access to large repositories of knowledge and significant computational power are embodied, as is the case with Maran and Data, we see what may be Star Trek’s most optimistic view for the future of the librarian and cultural heritage institutions. In Spartacus, Maran is so highly respected that it bears comment: Crusher notes that the androids “seem to place a lot of status in the office of librarian.” The novel repeatedly emphasizes android superiority in terms of processing new data. Before realizing that the androids are non-organic, Data and Riker are astonished by the speed at which they read, a conversation that ends with a proposed speedreading battle between Data and Maran, with Riker saying “I’d be willing to put him up against anyone when it comes to absorbing information. He doesn’t have the name he does for nothing.” When the androids want to know more about the Federation, Data arranges a “core copy dump” of considerable size, notably “unabridged” and “with attached appendices.” Jared, the android’s captain, begins the story of his life with “I was a scholar, a researcher. Tasks a machine is eminently suited for, wouldn’t you agree?”–and the rest of his narrative is peppered with references to speed and computational power.[16]
Data and the androids of Spartacus have been programmed to be good at data analysis–Jared’s claim to the role of scholar is not a randomly selected job that he happens to be good at as a machine; he was designed and configured to be a scholar. Data’s positronic brain was similarly designed and programmed to handle data. The science-fictionality of their physical hardware and their programs, paired with the understanding that they’re sentient, enables the fiction of a self-organizing artificial intelligence, one that can encounter truly novel data and make decisions about what to do with it. Despite the dream of fluid, fast, creative interaction with data embodied by the androids, Jared’s role as simultaneously scholar and slave on Vemla reminds us that data, especially “big” data, is often built on the labors of a large working underclass, deliberately or structurally rendered invisible. Even if androids are clearly processing their own data – in contrast to the greater ambiguity of the ship’s computer – that makes no claim on how the information came to be “data” in the first place, or what role a data-underclass might play in such a process.
Translation and the power of the computer
In the far future, the ship’s computer works with unfathomably large data and is constantly acquiring more– much of it “raw” sensor data that somehow must be sorted, stored, and interpreted or interpolated into maps, but also linguistic and cultural data based on conceptual frameworks that can be significantly different from those common among the most prominent species of the Federation. Librarians, digital humanities scholars, and others who are experienced with the challenges that accompany transforming the contemporary and historical materials of human civilization across many media, languages, and worldviews into something that resembles “data” for analysis will find that the idea of the ship’s computer automatically and autonomously parsing this new material may well be the most incredible technological invention in the Star Trek universe, although devices like the transporter, communicator, and tricorder tend to get the most attention.[17] Crispin’s Sarek includes one of the only examples of the laborious processes of cleaning and structuring data depicted as such: “… the only thing she’d let him work on was a tedious reworking of data structures, which told him little.”
One of the most computationally intensive tasks the ship’s computer does is translation of previously unencountered languages–it’s one of the few tasks that takes significant narrative time. The computer’s translation work, like its navigation work, requires massive databases that it itself appears to build. Waiting for the computer to be able to translate is a recurring plot point, and each time, presumably, the computer is doing what is referenced here, in Ward’s Armageddon’s Arrows: “Her tricorder continued to scan the unfamiliar controls, only a few of which now made sense thanks to the Enterprise computer’s ongoing efforts to build a language database for the universal translation protocols.” Building a database is significantly different from accessing one. They require decisions about ontology and relational structures that will subsequently structure the way users are able to query the data within.
Translation is a particularly noteworthy example because it is one of the few computational tasks that we see evolve – at least in part – throughout the broad narrative arc of the Star Trek universe. The work of building language databases and the work of translation protocols more broadly is still, for the most part, done by embodied sentience in the early days of the Federation. The first starship Enterprise employs a linguist, a position that fades into a more generic “coms” as the Federation’s language databases and Universal Translator improve. Starfleet improvements in quickly translating and understanding new languages are facilitated in two ways: improved algorithms resulting from advances in translation theory, and more data.
The relationship between advances in translation theory and the expensive and laborious acquisition of more data is explored in the novel tellingly titled Rosetta, a significant part of which is focalized through Hoshi Sato, the first starship Enterprise’s translator. In the novel, translation is framed as both art and science: explicitly, by the ship’s doctor, Phlox,[18] and implicitly, as it narrates the dense theoretical grounding of Hoshi’s schoolwork alongside long barrages of data and intuitive leaps. At this point in time, Universal Translation is a work-in-progress–an Andorian linguist is “attempt[ing] to move beyond dictionary-based translation to the development of a machine intelligence that could actually parse speech for linguistic concepts” (emphasis ours)–according to Hoshi’s professor, an impossibility and a necessity.
The novel repeatedly makes visible the labor and resources required to support work towards the goal of translation. Hoshi’s physical health suffers when she works too hard for too long on a problem; she spends a small fortune in credits on a database containing seven new languages; and the aforementioned Kanthropian database visualized as a library with a snarky gatekeeper is only a part of the resources marshaled in the attempt to translate a new alien language by a coalition of species, which notably also includes a lot of linguists working constantly on the problem.
All of this work vanishes, apparently in large part due to Hoshi’s contributions to translation theory and algorithms,[19] in the stories that take place in the far future. While the translation of new alien languages occasionally poses a difficulty significant enough that it requires a character’s intervention rather than computational time,[20] as the database expands in size, the computer is presumably able to handle more of the work. In some ways, the incredible computational power and unfathomably large memory of the ship’s computer can obscure the kind of work it is doing–in this case, the enormity of “database”–no less, a language database–eclipses the kind of work it is doing: “building” a database, which requires decisions at a relatively high level of specialized expertise (e.g. in order to make proper use of context) rather than anything resembling rote, bulk calculation.
Big data
Our comparisons between our world and science fiction often focus on the technological leaps: the spaceships, the teleporters, the computer algorithms. Even in our own era, we have seen the impact of advances in computing technology: not only hardware, but new kinds of algorithmic constructs like neural nets that bring about a seismic shift in the kinds of analysis that are possible even on a modest laptop. A great deal of potential has been unlocked through these changes, from improved computer vision that has vastly improved the digitization potential for text in many non-Latin writing systems, to machine translation that does not require extensive pondering to interpret. But suspending disbelief enough to imagine computational advances scaled out over centuries to bring us the technological landscape of Star Trek does not change the fact that computation alone is not enough: the algorithm feeds on data, and “data” as such does not occur in the natural world.[21] Both the android Data and the concept of data are artificial, the product of standards, norms, and a tremendous amount of labor. While some of that labor can be automated (e.g. the processing of sensor data from a standard set of ship sensors, within regular parameters, into data structures compatible with the rest of the holdings of the computer’s database), many other kinds of information – particularly linguistic and cultural information – pose fundamental barriers to any reliable automated data-conversion, especially when aiming to avoid sacrificing the nuance that constitutes a good deal of its meaning. Widely-adopted norms about how to count hyphenated words may be adequate to reliably wrestle text quantities into the agreeable form of “data”, but as Miriam Posner illustrates in “Data Trouble”, pinpointing an invention to a date in order to place it on a timeline, or flattening the complex ways that people formulate and describe their own identities into a “gender” drop-down on a form are much thornier problems, and ones not amenable to simply increasing computational power. These examples are drawn from the contemporary human world; how much more complexity would genuinely be at stake when working across species?
It is because of these concerns that there is so much promise in the embodied knowledge workers of the near and far future: Hoshi, Data, and the androids of Spartacus, even if not always librarians by title or job description, do the work of thinking about information, making decisions about its preparation and use, and intervening when automation proves inadequate – much as their predecessors in today’s libraries do. One can only hope for a brighter future for librarians than we see in Star Trek, where the horizons of these libraries do not shrink to the role of space-monitor, and their training can be put to fuller use as crucial and valued sentient data agents in a complex information landscape.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Laura M. Lefevre for her work on assembling an earlier version of this corpus: a seemingly-simple task of file and metadata reconciliation that would itself have been incredibly difficult to automate.
Bibliography
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Choy and Goh 2016. Choy, F. C. & Goh, S. N. “A Framework for Planning Academic Library Spaces”. Library Management, 37 (½), 13-28. https://hdl.handle.net/10356/82761
D’ignazio, C. and Klein, L.F., 2020. Data Feminism. MIT press.
Gorman 2000. Our Enduring Values: Librarianship in the 21st Century. Chicago: ALA editions. 2000.
Greenstein 2004. “Library Stewardship in a Networked Age”. In Access in the Future Tense, Council on Library and Information Resources, 2004. https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub126/
Jordan and Auernheimer 2018. Jordan, Philipp and Brent Auernheimer, “The Fiction in Computer Science: A Qualitative Data Analysis of the ACM Digital Library for Traces of Star Trek,” in Advances in Usability and User Experience, ed. Tareq Ahram and Christianne Falcão, vol. 607, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018), 508–20, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60492-3_48.)
Lotts 2020. Lotts, Megan. “The Art Librarian Wears Many Hats: A Survey of the Skills Art Librarians Need in the Twenty-First Century”. Art Documentation, 39, 286-299. https://doi.org/10.7282/t3-sarz-ed03
Posner 2009. Posner, Miriam. “Data Trouble”. Keynote at the American Philosophical Society, Jun 29, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggGXKSK-UP8
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[1] For more on “discovery” in the archives, see a roundup of two contrasting articles in the Atlantic that gained traction in the public discourse in 2012, “Is it Lost in the Archives?: Discovery Myths and Archival Labor”, in Illuminations, the Florida State University Special Collections blog, https://fsuspecialcollections.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/is-it-lost-in-the-archives-discovery-myths-and-archival-labor/
[2] Spartacus (T.L. Mancour, February 1992) Honor Bound (Diana G. Gallagher, 1997) The Flaming Arrow (Kathy Oltion and Jerry Oltion, 2000), and Rosetta (Dave Stern, 2006).
[3] “… I’m talking about Valhalla, the literary reference….” – “Dammit, Mac, I’m a captain, not a librarian!” – Star Trek Gateways: What Lay Beyond, Keith R. A. DeCandido and Peter David. 2001.
[4] “Sssshhh…” The harsh whisper made them both turn to see one of the librarians – this one a middle-aged human female who struck Riker as being prune-faced. He fought back a grin; here they were, Number One and the ship’s counselor, getting shushed like a couple of high-school kids. – Star Trek Insurrection, J. M. Dillard, 1998
[5] New Earth book series, especially The Flaming Arrow, Kathy Oltion and Jerry Oltion, 2000, and Thin Air, Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, 2000.
[6] See Spock’s World, Diane Duane, 1988: “He nodded a greeting to the librarian at the front desk and headed on past him towards the carrels”
[7] A Time to Love, Robert Greenberger, 2004. “The ship’s librarian enforced the age-old belief in keeping quiet in libraries, allowing others to concentrate.”
[8] See Provenance of Shadows, David R. George, 2006: “Turning his attention back to the newspaper, McCoy peered again at the concise Italian entries. He’d nearly reached the bottom of the page by the time the librarian drew near. “Pardon me,” the woman said, and McCoy looked up at her. Older, perhaps in her sixties, she was short of stature, but possessed an aquiline nose that suggested a commanding presence. Her nametag, pinned to the white collar of her conservative, otherwise-blue dress, read Miss Zabrzeski. “I’m afraid you only have fifteen more minutes before you’ll have to leave,” she said.
[9] This scenario has real-world parallels in Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO), an initiative led by librarians to web archive at-risk Ukrainian cultural heritage websites following Russia’s February 2022 invasion, with the goal of returning the data to cultural heritage workers in Ukraine when they are in a position to rebuild.
[10] The script is available under an open-source license on GitHub at https://github.com/quinnanya/librarian-computer-android-big-data
[11] David R. George III, Raise the Dawn, 2012.
[12] Jeffrey Lang, Immortal Coil, 2002.
[13] Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore, A Time to Sow, 2004.
[14] John Vornholt, Masks, 1989.
[15] “Computer, could the system have been deactivated by any of the fourteen stations?” – John J. Ordover, ed. What Lay Beyond, 2001.
[16] E.g. “I searched all the texts and tomes he owned, then searched the Great Library. ‘What is life?’ I wondered, and looked everyplace, faster than any Vemlan could, and slowly I formed a definition.”
[17]A meta-analysis of the references to Star Trek in research on Human-Computer interaction found 22 instances of the ship’s computer in discussions of Natural Language User Interfaces, although references to Star Trek Devices dominate, with 50 publications. (Jordan and Auernheimer, 2018)
[18] “For Ensign Sato, translation is as much an art as a science. It involves intuitive reasoning as well as the collation of a learned body of knowledge.”
[19] “linguacode,” mentioned in the ENT TV episode “In a Mirror, Darkly II”
[20] E.g. in the TNG episode “Darmok”
[21] See D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein’s (2020) Data Feminism.
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