Suren Pahlevan was awarded a bursary to attend the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School in 2024. To join the mailing list and learn about the next summer school sign up here. Read about Suren's experience at the summer school here:
Hi there, I’m a PhD student at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Music, my doctoral project is an ethnomusicological study of AI tools for music production. I attended the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School 2024 via zoom, and I was enrolled on the AI and Creative Industries strand. I was interested in attending to widen my knowledge of the literature particularly surrounding music and AI, and to this end the line-up of the course was very helpful. The ability to attend online was extremely useful also bexause although I would have loved to have been there in person at Oxford, my schedule at the time was quite busy with deadlines. The three-day summer school was filled with a wide range of lectures – often fairly interactive – that covered the topic of AI and Creativity Industries from multiple different perspectives and angles.
Whilst my PhD research overlapped to some extent with the broader focus of the summer school, I learned a lot from listening to the academics who presented. For example, I was already familiar with Professor David De Roure having read some of his work and having attended a lecture by him prior to this summer school. Regardless, I found that his historical account of developments and innovations in AI and Creativity filled a crucial gap in my knowledge on the topic where keeping up-to-date with the latest journal publications doesn’t often suffice.
Furthermore, with my research requiring me to conduct a lot of ethnographic fieldwork, both digital and in-person, I found Dr Poppy Wilde’s ‘Ethnography as method: exploring the digital and auto realms’ lecture to be highly insightful and informative. It was useful to have both a mix of lectures including content and explanations of methodological approaches in order to enable me to produce research of a top standard in line with the field.
The summer school allowed us to connect and engage with the lecturers, asking them questions throughout and after their sessions. We were also able to read, discuss and debate the comments and questions of other attendees. The structure of each day included breaks in-between each session, and this allowed me to organise my notes before attending the lecture that then followed.
Overall, my time at this virtual summer school was highly impactful on my own research and its direction, and it was a great opportunity to be able to engage with brilliant academics in a somewhat more casual setting than a university lecture hall. I feel more informed and aware of the wider interdisciplinary areas of study that surround ‘AI and Creativity’ in particular, and this educational experience helped broaden my knowledge of the literature too. It was brilliantly ran – thank you to the entire team.
