Meredith Martin, an English professor and director of the Center for Digital Humanities, alongside Peter Henderson, an assistant professor of computer science and a member of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, are among 23 research teams globally selected for prestigious funding by Schmidt Sciences through its new Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI).
The HAVI awards are notably competitive and aim to harness artificial intelligence to enhance research and scholarship in the humanities. As Wendy Schmidt, co-founder of the initiative, stated, “Our newest technologies may shine a light on our oldest truths, revealing the essence of what makes us human—from the origins of civilization to the heights of philosophical inquiry and contemporary art and film.”
Martin’s project will utilize AI tools to examine English poetry across centuries, while Henderson’s focus is on unraveling the evolution of American legal thought throughout various jurisdictions since the nation’s founding.
Additionally, three more scholars affiliated with Princeton have secured grants: Peter Bol, an alumnus from the Class of 1982; Jim Casey, a former postdoctoral researcher; and Giovanna Ceserani, a previous fellow in Princeton’s Society of Fellows.
Interpreting the Law and Its Evolution
Henderson serves as the principal investigator for the initiative titled “AI for Understanding the Law and Its Evolution,” which has received a three-year grant totaling $500,000.
The research aims to unite legal scholars, historians, and computer scientists to develop open AI tools that can enhance legal and historical inquiries across a vast array of cases, statutes, oral arguments, and historical documents in multiple languages. These innovative tools will enable the research team to explore how new legal concepts are formed and disseminated, how judges interpret statutes, and how these interpretative practices evolve over time and across different legal systems.
Deborah Pearlstein, director of Princeton SPIA’s Program in Law and Public Policy and the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor in Law and Public Affairs, is also co-leading this project.
Parsing English Poetry Across Time
Martin is part of the international team working on the project “An ML Toolkit to Find Hierarchical Structure in Multi-Modal/Lingual Data,” which has been awarded up to $450,000 over three years.
Led by Tom Lippincott at Johns Hopkins University, this project unites experts in literary studies, linguistics, musicology, and machine learning from the U.S. and the UK to develop tools that leverage AI for analyzing structural patterns in poetry, narrative fiction, and music across various languages and historical periods.
Focusing on the Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry corpus, which houses 336,180 poems dating from 900 C.E. to the 20th century, Martin will spearhead the poetry segment, documenting how the structural elements of English verse—such as form, rhyme, and meter—convey meaning through time.
Grants for Three More Princetonians
- Peter Bol, a 1982 Princeton alumnus and the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, is leading the initiative “Connectivity and Individuality in Textual Traditions: Augmenting Retrieval for Eurasian Languages.” His team aims to train multilingual AI models to examine Asian-language manuscripts for historical economic and political studies.
- Jim Casey, a former postdoc at Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities and currently an assistant professor of English at the University of California-Santa Barbara, is also the co-founder of the Center for Black Digital Research. He is leading the project “Communities in the Loop: AI for Cultures and Contexts in Multimodal Archives,” where his team will develop a searchable database of 19th-century Black newspapers, making it freely available to the public.
- Giovanna Ceserani, a professor of classics at Stanford University and a former fellow in Princeton’s Society of Fellows, is at the helm of the project “SETS: A Set-Based Architecture for Knowledge Structures.” Her team seeks to design a new AI architecture that more accurately reflects human reading processes using languages from pre-modern Europe, Western Asia, and Africa.
This groundbreaking work represents a significant step forward in integrating AI into the humanities, promising to create new avenues for research and scholarship that deepen our understanding of human culture and history.
