Research talk: Is AI for me? Perspectives from the humanities: humans and machines

In the final instalment of our miniseries "Is AI for me? Perspectives from the humanities", we're joined by Ruth Ahnert, professor of literary history and digital humanities at Queen Mary, University of London. A Turing Fellow and co-author of Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data, Ruth's academic career started as an "analogue" humanities scholar. Since then, she has collaborated with data scientists, and her work has increasingly engaged with computational methods.

In this episode, Ruth and Peter explore the relationship between humans and machines, how the latter can aid critical thinking and how source evaluation of data can help us understand the outcomes of AI processes. They go on to talk about 'Living with Machines', a five-year research project conducted by the Alan Turing Institute, delving into some of the findings that show humanist approaches are influencing how scientists tackle complex problems. Ruth talks about large-scale data and the shift towards its use in the humanities. They close this final episode, touching on the transferable skills for the workplace that humanities students develop by mastering digital methods and a critical grasp of cutting-edge technologies.