Meredith Martin (English), director of the Center for Digital Humanities, was selected by Schmidt Sciences for an award from the foundation’s new Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI).
The highly competitive HAVI awards are designed to leverage artificial intelligence to accelerate humanities research and scholarship, according to the Schmidt Sciences announcement.
Martin is part of the international team for the project “An ML Toolkit to Find Hierarchical Structure in Multi-Modal/Lingual Data,” led by Tom Lippincott of Johns Hopkins University. The project will bring together experts in the U.S. and the UK in literary studies, linguistics, musicology and machine learning to create tools that use AI to analyze structural patterns in poetry, narrative fiction, and music across different languages and historical periods.
Working with the Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry corpus of 336,180 poems written between 900 C.E. and the 20th century, Martin will lead the poetry study, chronicling how the poetic structures of English verse — including form, rhyme and meter — carry meaning across time.
Two former scholars associated with the Humanities Council also received HAVI awards:
- Jim Casey (University of California-Santa Barbara), a former Perkins Fellow and postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Digital Humanities and the Humanities Council who is also co-founder of the Center for Black Digital Research, is leading the project “Communities in the Loop: AI for Cultures and Contexts in Multimodal Archives.” His team will create a searchable database of 19th-century Black newspapers, freely accessible to the public.
- Giovanna Ceserani (Stanford University), a former fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, is leading the project “SETS: A Set-Based Architecture for Knowledge Structures.” Her team will create a new AI architecture that seeks to more accurately reflect the way humans read, using languages from pre-modern Europe, Western Asia and Africa.
Read more about Meredith Martin’s award on the Center for Digital Humanities website.
