Sarah Immel

Research keywords: Digital identity, creative AI, participatory design, creative writing, large language models

Bio:

Sarah completed her BA in Human-Computer Interaction and Creative Writing at Whitworth University in 2019, where she developed skills as a web developer, fiction writer, and designer. In 2023 she moved to Edinburgh to pursue a master’s degree in Narrative Futures: Art, Data, Society, where she found a supportive environment to bring her technical and creative skills together to address the increasingly complex questions of what it is to be a writer, a creative, and a human in digitally-mediated spaces. The creative component of her MSc dissertation can be found at https://datadoppelganger.com.

While her background and skillsets are highly interdisciplinary, Sarah is first and foremost a reader, writer, and interpreter of stories. She draws upon methods and theory from disciplines as diverse as digital humanities, natural language processing, critical rhetoric, and human-computer interaction in order to understand what happens when we treat stories as data and, at the same time, the narratives that emerge when we interrogate the stories data has to tell.

PhD research:

In a culture increasingly drawn to large language models and their ever-expanding datasets, what do our small, individual scribblings say about us, and to whom? How do we create meaning within this cacophony of information and influx of generated texts?

Sarah’s research explores alternatives to these ethically fraught and largely impersonal text generation methods. She examines the affordances and limitations of digital identities—the ones we curate for ourselves and those constructed for us by corporations—and questions whether the same tools which encode these identities might be used in responsible and co-creative ways to encounter, understand, and reclaim the narratives being constructed around us.

Supervisors: Bea Alex, Susan Lechelt