Abstract

This paper surveys a range of methodological approaches to underpin a creative project that will develop a pair of online, computer-based conversational agents to interact as “comedian” and “straight man”. The project will interrogate the scriptwriting process as it is applied to a pair of interacting chat-bots: a confluence of human and non-human agency. This survey is necessary due to the project’s trans-disciplinary nature; it borrows from information science, drama and scriptwriting, creativity theory, humour theory, and interactive design. “Ontology and epistemology can be considered as the foundations upon which research is built. Methodology, methods and sources are closely connected to, and built upon, our ontological and epistemological assumptions” (Grix 2004, p. 58). These ontological and epistemological foundations are often viewed as tacit knowledge within the disciplines, however, there appears to be little agreement across disciplines. Positioned in this manner, the researcher is implicated inside larger research structures in much the same manner as the creative individual is implicated in the systemic view of creativity offered by Csikszentmihalyi (1999; 2003). This is not a privileged position. The researchers themselves operate within same “discourses and traditions” as the object of study, “consequently, knowledge is theoretically or discursively laden” (Marsh and Furlong 2002, p. 26). The purpose of this paper is to explore these issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives to make the implicit explicit.