Sophie Whittle

SSI fellow

University of Sheffield

I am currently a Research Associate at the Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield, where I am responsible for developing projects and writing collaborative grants that investigate machine assisted methods for the humanities, including fields such as scholarly editing, computational literary studies, and digital pedagogy. I explore the capabilities of AI and machine learning in ways that sustain critical thinking and creativity, all while centring the human.

My background is in linguistics, having completed my PhD at Sheffield in 2023. Here I trained in corpus-based, statistical and qualitative methods for analysing linguistic change in the history of English. The knowledge I gained in linguistics has led me to consider how human language is replicated by generative AI outputs, and how this ultimately impacts students and researchers’ engagement with these technologies.

I also worked as an RA on the C21 Editions project at the DHI, where I experimented with different machine learning methods to produce a teaching edition of a text by Geoffrey Chaucer, a poet in the fourteenth century. Here I learned about how AI might impact future learning and teaching from conducting focus groups and interviews with students and lecturers. Since conducting this research, I have been advocating for critical thinking and informed decision-making around the use of AI that uphold the values important to the humanities.