Diane Morrow & Crystal Silver

I guess I came into this project and this series of podcast interviews with the idea that a technology project around the social sciences and humanities, either one of them, would be very neatly divided into camps.

There'd be the humanities people over here and there'd be the technology people over here.

And both of you seem very comfortable in both worlds.

It seems like that there isn't much of a distinction between the two.

Diane, you described yourself as a nerd.

Crystal, I don't know if you would, but there is this sort of fluidity between domains, I guess you'd say, the humanities researchers who are also data researchers.

Is that just how the world is these days?

For me personally, my PhD is in social agency.

So sense of agency is our responsibility.

We feel over our actions.

And when you interact with the environment, that's super straightforward, right? So you switch on a light switch, the light comes on.

You're responsible for that.

But then in social interaction, it's so much more complicated.

And that's why it's interesting when you talk about human-computer interaction and where we feel now when we're being innovative and we're adopting things.

But I think moving forward, even social sciences and humanities research, we're also open-minded to embrace it.

Life's going one way and one way only.

Where AI is here, AI is here to stay, everyone's getting more technical.

And also, I hate to be pigeonholed.

And I think we've had all these wonderful conversations about co-creation.

And that comes from a place of being open minded, being curious.

Like we're all researchers, regardless of your research domain.

We're all human beings that have a very open mind.

And I just love to find out about like the workshop that we've just been taken out of about ontologies.

Before today, I knew very, very, very little about it.

But I was like fascinated and I was so in it because that's just who we are as people.