Image description: A photo of a woman of African descent smiling and looking at the camera.
Dr. Seyi Olojo is a critical information studies scholar who uses qualitative interpretivist methods to examine the epistemic cultures of the natural language processing. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University with joint affiliations in the Center for Information Technology Policy and the Center for Digital Humanities.
Seyi's dissertation investigated the politics of digitizing and mechanizing African languages, where African language communities hold visions for language revitalization and cultural preservation. She situated natural language processing as a sociotechnical practice that mediates hierarchies of power within a global political economy of AI.
Her current work explores how AI-mediated translations change what is at stake for these communities, particularly the Yoruba speech community of Southwestern Nigeria. She asks what becomes of indigenous knowledge when contending with the authority and artificial memory of AI.
Seyi's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the US Fulbright Program. She received her PhD in Information Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2026.
Selected Publications
Seyi Olojo, Matthew Bui. Data Fabulation: Counter Fictions and Truth Telling within Data Production. De Gruyter Handbook on Critical Data Studies, 2026.
Daniel Chechelnitsky, Sireesh Gururaja, Seyi Olojo, Giuseppe Attanasio, Wesley Hanwen Deng, Chrysoula Zerva, and Maarten Sap. Locating Translation as a Craft in the Age of AI. In Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 666-677. 2026.
Seyi Olojo, Janina Zakrzewski, Andrew Smart, Erin van Liemt, Milagros Miceli, Amber Ebinama, Lameck Mbangula Amugongo. Lost in Machine Translation: The Sociocultural Implications of Language Technologies in Nigeria. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, June 2025.
Yuya Shibuya, Seyi Olojo, Andrea Hamm, Radhika Krishnan,Teresa Cerratto Pargman. Can Civic Data be Counterdata and Open Data? Exploring the Limits of Data, Contestation and Governance. Nomos, May 2025.
Andrew Smart, Ben Hutchinson, Lameck Mbangula Amugongo, Suzanne Dikker, Alex Zito, Amber Ebinama, Zara Wudiri, Ding Wang, Erin van Liemt, João Sedoc, Seyi Olojo, Stanley Uwakwe, Edem Wornyo, Sonja Schmer-Galunder, Jamila Smith-Loud. Socially Responsible Data for Large Multilingual Language Models. ACM conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization, September 2024.
Seyi Olojo. ”Counterdata”. Data & Society Keywords on the Datafied State Anthology, April 2024.
Liza Gak, Seyi Olojo, Niloufar Salehi. The Distressing Ads That Persist: Uncovering the Harms of Hyperpersonalized Diet and Weightloss Ads Among Users Recovering from Eating Disorders. ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, November 2022.
Claudia Von Vacano, Renee Starowicz, Evan Muzzall, Michael Ruiz, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, Seyi Olojo, Arlyn Y Moreno Luna, David J Harding. Towards a Conceptual Framework for Developing and Analyzing Inclusive STEM Programs in Higher Education. Frontiers in Psychology, May 2022.