Mark Aldridge on Combining Traditional Scholarship and AI

This presentation, entitled "BBC Maestro's Agatha Christie Course: Combining Traditional Scholarship and AI," was the opening keynote of the 2025 NISO Plus Global Online Conference. Dr. Mark Aldridge, Associate Professor of Screen Histories at Southampton Solent University and Agatha Christie historian, delivered his talk on February 16.

Aldridge explains how he led a team of experts to create an innovative new course for BBC Maestro in which Agatha Christie was able to relay her own advice and share her working methods. The team scrutinized the words and work of Christie, who died in 1976, and put together a script to be performed by an actor, whose appearance and voice were then modified by AI to make her more closely resemble the writer.

Watch the embedded video above or view in the NISO Video Library.