Meet the 2025 CDH Thesis Prize Honorees: Samantha Chen and Caroline Coen

Each year, the Center for Digital Humanities recognizes outstanding undergraduate work in digital humanities with the Senior Thesis Prize. This year’s prize went to James Zhang ’25 (read our Q&A with James). Samantha Chen ’25 and Caroline Coen ’25 received honorable mentions. 

We’re excited to share more about Samantha and Caroline’s research.

SAMANTHA CHEN

“Modeling Movement in Ancient Pompeii: An Urban Network Analysis of Pedestrian Flow and Economic Change” (advisor: Margaret Holen)

Major: Operations Research and Financial Engineering
Minors: Archaeology, Computer Science

How did Pompeii’s pedestrian pathways change in the years leading up to Mount Vesuvius’s eruption? And how could the flow of traffic have affected the city’s economy?

These questions drove Samantha Chen’s senior thesis, which brought together her knowledge of operations research and financial engineering (ORFE) with her interests in archaeology and computer science.

“Finding the most efficient route in a physical space, like planning out the best driving and rest stops for a road trip, is a classic problem in operations research and computer science, especially in network theory,” Samantha explained. “Since I knew I wanted my thesis to have an archaeology focus, I started looking for studies that combined archaeology with network analysis.”

After learning more about modeling pedestrian movement patterns, she discovered data from the Pompeii Bibliography and Mapping Project and decided to focus her research on the ancient city. The choice made sense. Samantha had taken a course on Pompeii in her sophomore year. 

Using Urban Network Analysis, Samantha came to a surprising conclusion: the earthquakes that rattled Pompeii during the pre-eruption period, and the dead-end routes that resulted, had little effect on pedestrian patterns. Her findings thus call into question a theory that the earthquakes changed how people circulated in Pompeii, causing growth in the retail economy.

“This was really exciting because it shows there’s still a lot we don’t fully understand about what drove Pompeii’s economic shift,” she noted. “It opened up new questions and possibilities for future research, which is always one of the best outcomes in a project like this.”

Samantha enjoyed the interdisciplinary nature of her project.

“Working with digital humanities ended up being the perfect intersection of my ORFE education and my love for archaeology. I knew I had the skills to work with complex data thanks to my engineering and computer science training, and digital humanities gave me the space to apply those skills in a meaningful way. Completing my thesis on a DH-focused topic made my work in ORFE feel even more rewarding and helped me realize how valuable it is to bridge those two worlds.”

CAROLINE COEN

“Machine Learning Classification of Biblical Translations Across Languages and Literary Genres” (advisor: Christopher Moretti)

Major: Computer Science
Minors: Humanistic Studies and Italian

Caroline Coen traces her senior thesis to one evening early last year.

First, at a dinner with the Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows, a group for students interested in the humanities, Caroline listened to a presentation by Wouter Haverals, Perkins Fellow in the Humanities Council and CDH Associate Research Scholar. Wouter discussed using ChatGPT to analyze translations of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, in which Queneau retells the same short story in many different literary styles. 

After that, Caroline attended a Bible study with the Princeton Christian Fellowship, where the group discussed questions of translation: for example, whereas some translators provide word-for-word equivalencies, others stick less closely to the text. 

“With these two evening discussions top-of-mind,” Caroline explained, “the idea for my thesis was born. I wanted to see how language and translation in different publications of the Bible would impact how a machine learning model understood Biblical genre, and what those findings could tell us about Bible translation and the Bible as a whole.” 

Caroline worked with translations in four languages—English, Spanish, German, and Italian—and six genres, such as Historical Narrative, Law, and Prophecy.

Her takeaway? The translator’s approach matters.

“Machine learning models could much better identify distinct Biblical genres (in all four languages) when the Bible translation was written with formal equivalence—staying as true to the original manuscript as possible,” she noted. “When the translator made more of their own translation decisions (and therefore inserted a unique voice and style across all of the Bible), the machine learning models saw less of a quantitative difference across Biblical genres.”

Like Samantha’s, Caroline’s thesis was a fitting capstone to an undergraduate career spanning STEM and the humanities. In addition to her degree in computer science, Caroline also earned minors in Humanistic Studies and Italian. 

“I believe that adding the study of the humanities to a study of computer science is a great way to complete one’s liberal arts education. Understanding the interdisciplinary connections that can exist between the humanities and computer science helps one view the world more holistically and see that fields that seem widely disparate are actually interrelated.”