Meredith Martin, professor of English and director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University, and Peter Henderson, assistant professor of computer science and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, have been selected as recipients of grants from Schmidt Sciences’ new Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI). They are among 23 research teams worldwide chosen for this award.
The HAVI awards aim to use artificial intelligence to speed up research in the humanities. According to Wendy Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Sciences, “Our newest technologies may shed light on our oldest truths, on all that makes us human — from the origins of civilization to the peaks of philosophical thought to contemporary art and film.”
Martin’s project will apply AI tools to analyze English poetry spanning several centuries. Henderson’s work will focus on using AI to study American legal thinking across different jurisdictions since the country was founded.
Three other scholars with ties to Princeton also received grants: Peter Bol, a Class of 1982 alumnus; Jim Casey, a former postdoctoral researcher; and Giovanna Ceserani, a past fellow in Princeton’s Society of Fellows.
Peter Henderson is leading the project titled “AI for Understanding the Law and Its Evolution,” which has received $500,000 over three years. The initiative brings together legal scholars, historians, and computer scientists who plan to develop open-source AI tools for researching large collections of legal cases, statutes, oral arguments, and historical documents in multiple languages. The team will investigate how new legal ideas are formed and spread, how judges interpret laws over time and across jurisdictions. Deborah Pearlstein—director of Princeton SPIA’s Program in Law and Public Policy—is one of the project’s co-principal investigators.
Meredith Martin is part of an international team working on “An ML Toolkit to Find Hierarchical Structure in Multi-Modal/Lingual Data,” awarded up to $450,000 over three years. Led by Tom Lippincott at Johns Hopkins University, this group includes experts from both the U.S. and UK specializing in literary studies, linguistics, musicology, and machine learning. Their goal is to create AI tools capable of analyzing structural patterns found in poetry, narrative fiction, and music across various languages and historical periods. Martin will lead analysis using a corpus containing more than 336 thousand poems written between 900 C.E. and the twentieth century.
Other grant recipients with connections to Princeton include Peter Bol—now at Harvard University—who leads a project training multilingual AI models for studying Asian-language manuscripts; Jim Casey—now at UC Santa Barbara—whose team will build a searchable database for nineteenth-century Black newspapers; and Giovanna Ceserani at Stanford University whose project focuses on developing new AI architecture reflecting human reading processes using pre-modern languages from Europe as well as Western Asia and Africa.
