Meredith Martin part of $450K HAVI Award on Johns Hopkins-Led Project Analyzing Hierarchical Structure in Poetry, Music, and Narrative

Congratulations to Meredith Martin, Professor of English and Director of the Center for Digital Humanities, who has been selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) award by Schmidt Sciences.

Professor Martin is part of a grant of up to $450,000 led by Tom Lippincott (Johns Hopkins University) with co-PIs John Hale (Johns Hopkins University) and Robert Lieck (Durham University). The project, "An ML Toolkit to Find Hierarchical Structure in Multi-Modal/Lingual Data," will develop computational methods to analyze structural patterns in poetry, narrative fiction, and music across different languages and historical periods.

The collaboration brings together expertise in literary studies, linguistics, musicology, and machine learning to create tools that both apply AI to illuminate cultural artifacts and draw on humanistic understanding to advance how AI models learn sequential structure. The interdisciplinary team includes researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, and Durham University.

About the Project

The research addresses a fundamental challenge: how humans experience and create hierarchical structure in cultural artifacts under cognitive limitations. From poetic meter and narrative patterns to musical form, structure guides creative expression and shapes how we perceive and remember art across time and cultures.

The team will develop a Python library for defining, training, and interpreting sequence models designed to infer hierarchical structure, along with three humanistic case studies examining poetry, language and narrative, and music. Professor Martin will lead the poetry case study, investigating how poetic structures—including form, rhyme, and meter—have been deployed, interpreted, and taught over more than a millennium of English verse. Working with the Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry corpus of 336,180 poems written between 900 CE and the present day, the research will explore questions such as when and where poetic meter is predictably regular or irregular, and how metrical and rhythmic patterns carry meaning across time.

Broader Impact

Schmidt Sciences has awarded $11 million to 23 research teams around the world who are exploring new ways to bring artificial intelligence into dialogue with the humanities, from archaeology and art history to literature, linguistics, film studies, and beyond. As part of the Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI), these interdisciplinary teams will both apply AI to illuminate the human record and draw on humanistic questions, methods, and values to advance how AI itself is designed and used.

Read more about all 23 awarded projects: https://www.schmidtsciences.org/havi-2025-announcement/

Celebrating the HAVI Community

Beyond celebrating Professor Martin's award, we're thrilled to see so many CDH colleagues and collaborators among this year's 23 HAVI awardees—a testament to the vibrant, interconnected community advancing digital humanities research.

Peter Henderson (Computer Science, Princeton University) is developing "AI for Understanding the Law and its Evolution"—creating AI tools to trace how legal ideas spark, spread, and change across centuries of multilingual, multimodal legal texts.

Jim Casey (UC Santa Barbara) is leading "Communities in the Loop"—developing AI methods to identify veiled protest in 19th-century Black newspapers. Jim is a former CDH postdoc, and we're proud to see his vital work recognized.

Peter Bol (Harvard University), a Princeton PhD alum from 1980, is leading "Augmenting Retrieval for Eurasian Languages"—training multilingual AI models to study Asian-language manuscripts, including low-resource languages like Tibetan, to reduce bias in historical research.

David Bamman (UC Berkeley) is creating Kinolab to bridge large-scale computational analysis with close viewing of film and television. David has been a valued collaborator through our New Languages for NLP initiative, LLM speaker series, and Ends of Prosody event.

Co-investigator, Lauren Tilton (University of Richmond), spoke at CDH in October 2024 on "Distant Viewing: AI and Ways of Seeing" for our Humanities for AI series.

Matthew Wilkens (Cornell) leads "Artificial Intelligence for Cultural and Historical Reasoning" with collaborators including David Mimno (PPA board member), Ted Underwood (Startwords contributor), and Andrew Piper (early Humanities Council visitor through German).

Gregory Crane (Tufts University) is working on "Beyond Translation: Opening up the Human Record." Greg was the very first speaker we invited for the Digital Humanities Initiative back in c. 2012. His collaborator, David Smith, serves on our PPA board and participated in Ends of Prosody.