“Creativity is a paradigmatically human trait. It is valued by humans only insofar as it is a value for humans. We cannot lose sight of this if we want to responsibly harness the power of Artificial Intelligence to support and enhance human creativity.”
Dr Caterina Moruzzi, Creativity, AI, and the Human Cluster Lead
Creativity is a force for transformation, innovation, expression, and adaptation. The recent accelerated development of generative AI technologies is raising both fascination and concerns regarding its impact on the creative process and the broader creative ecosystem.
The “Creativity, AI, and the Human” cluster recognises the ubiquity of creativity in human experience and its central role in navigating the unpredictability of our futures. Leveraging the broad range of expertise and vision of its members, the cluster explores ways in which we, as a community, can guide the development of AI in a way that furthers its opportunity of empowering human creativity, at the same time mitigating its challenges.
Meet our researchers
Beth Tianxin Xia
Caroline Parkinson
Chen Zao
Chris Elsden
Gavin Leuzzi
Javier Tejera
Lily Boyington
Maddy Burgoyne
Sarah Immel
Siddharth Biswas
Theories and practices of creativity
Gavin Leuzzi
Sarah Immel
AI in creative domains
Caroline Parkinson
Chris Elsden
Gavin Leuzzi
Javier Tejera
Sarah Immel
Human-centred and social dimensions of AI
Chris Elsden
AI ethics, responsibility, and governance
Chris Elsden
Gavin Leuzzi
AI in knowledge and learning contexts
Javier Tejera
Our external researchers
Events
Share & connect
Monthly hybrid sessions to share work in progress and new initiatives. These meetings are an opportunity to learn more about the exciting projects that cluster members are involved in. Each session, a few cluster members share what they are working on. Get in touch if you would like to be invited to take part in these sessions!
Upcoming events and workshops will be posted here.
Digital Method of the Month: What LLMs Can and Cannot Do
The digital method of the month meeting is a safe space to freely discuss the practicalities of learning and implementing a new digital skill in your research. During this session, we will introduce the concept of Large Language Models (LLMs), discuss their strengths and weaknesses, and explore how they can be effectively integrated into research workflows.
Getting Started with Python for Research
This course will introduce attendees to the basic concepts and features of Python programming language. The goal is for participants to feel comfortable with creating simple Python programs and provide them with the autonomy and confidence required to progress independently.
Getting Started with R for Research
This beginner-friendly course will focus on developing skills and a fundamental understanding of R and RStudio. Participants will develop a familiarity with the principles and functionalities of R and RStudio, allowing them to confidently apply these, or indeed seek out new concepts, for their current and future research.
Network Analysis from Scratch: Intro to Gephi
This three-session course introduces attendees to Gephi, a free and open-source network analysis and visualisation tool. The main focus will be on social network analysis, and attendees will have the opportunity to apply their own dataset in Gephi.
Digital Method of the Month: Geospatial Data and GIS
The digital method of the month meeting is a safe space to freely discuss the practicalities of learning and implementing a new digital skill in your research. The method of this month is GIS, or Geographic Information Systems. GIS is a computer system that combines maps and databases to help people create, manage, and analyse information about places.
From Images to Text: Working with OCR
This course is an introduction to extracting text from images and scanned PDFs using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques. In the course, we will give you an overview of text extraction, demonstrate how OCR works in practice, using free, ready-to-use tools that are widely available.
Collecting Data from the Web: Foundations of Webscraping
This workshop introduces the fundamentals of scraping user-generated content from the web using R or Python. The session will be hands-on, working through the process of scraping a selected static website step by step, before concluding with a discussion of the limitations of scraping and the challenges posed by more complex dynamic sites.
Introduction to Geographical Data with QGIS
This course will focus on developing skills and a fundamental understanding of Geospatial data and the basic functionalities of QGIS. Each session begins with a presentation that introduces the theoretical principles and is followed by a guided practical exercise where these principles can be tested and applied, as well as developed upon. Please bring a mouse with you to the session.
Digital Method of the Month: Data Visualisation
The digital method of the month meeting is a safe space to freely discuss the practicalities of learning and implementing a new digital skill in your research. A big part of conveying research results hinges on how these results are presented. Join us to discuss the main principles of effective and reproducible data visualisation.
Silent Disco: Foundations of Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is the process of determining whether a piece of writing is positive, negative or neutral. Its use has become relatively widespread, including being used to analyse customer feedback, social media, user surveys, and more. This workshop will cover how it works; pros and cons; using it on text, user feedback and online sources.
Using API for Research
In this course we will cover what application programming interface (API)s are, what they do, how to use them to access and connect data sources. We will also discuss practical considerations such as rate limits, authentication, and the availability of APIs for researchers.
Getting Started with Descriptive Statistics
This workshop will focus on developing practical skills for summarising and exploring data using R or Python. The session will introduce key concepts in descriptive statistics, including measures of central tendency, measures of variability and data distributions.
Silent Disco: Working with Named Places: How and Why to Build a Gazetteer
This lesson teaches how to create a digital gazetteer from a historical text using the Linked Places Delimited (LP-TSV) format. A gazetteer records place names, spatial extents, and historical data, offering a structured knowledge system to connect places, events, and people across time. It is a key tool for spatial history and digital humanities.
Using Prompting Efficiently for Research
This workshop aims to introduce the main strategies of prompt engineering including tips and certain practices to achieve optimal outputs with Generative AI (Gen-AI) tools. After providing a hands-on overview of prompt engineering, certain features of ChatGPT will be discussed for fostering the research practices.
Build Your Personal or Project Website with GitHub Pages
GitHub Pages is a free service that includes different website templates and is used by many academics for personal and project websites. While it requires some programming skills, it is easy to set up and highly customizable. During this course, we will help you set up your own website with GitHub pages, add content to it, and make small design changes if desired.
Working with Archive Data (pictures of text, scanned files, PDFs)
The workshop will focus on developing a batch-processing workflow rather than processing documents individually. By the end of the workshop, participants will have a better understanding of how to use Python to transform scanned documents and image-based PDFs into searchable text.
Digital Method of the Month: Software Development with Generative AI
The digital method of the month meeting is a safe space to freely discuss the practicalities of learning and implementing a new digital skill in your research. During this session we will discuss trade-offs regarding gains in productivity and the dangers of producing executable code; how the development of these tools changes the nature of learning to code; as well as best practices and strategies for exploring this safely.
Updates
Related programmes
Study across the University of Edinburgh:
Postgraduate Programmes:
Postgraduate Courses:
- Art and Digital Culture
- Design for interactive media
- Game Design Studio
- Internet, Society and Economy
Undergraduate Courses:
