Karen Barad

Paper argues LLMs as cultural measurement tools constitute rather than passively record cultural reality

A new arXiv preprint proposes a theoretical framework for understanding NLP work on culture as a 'material-discursive practice,' drawing on Karen Barad's concept of the agential cut to argue that model, data, annotation, and evaluation choices actively shape the cultural phenomena they purport to measure. The author illustrates this through six case studies involving television and film dialogue analysis, including examination of how LLMs erase cultural markers, attune to historical material, and exercise agency in agentic workflows. The paper calls for a theory-driven, empirically rigorous, and culturally contingent research program that treats methodological choices as ethical commitments. This is primarily a philosophy-of-science and methodology contribution to the cultural NLP subfield.