Digital Humanities Lecture by Meredith Martin

“Humanities & AI: Modeling Culture Across the Disciplines” Computational social scientists have long worked to show the necessity of integrating social scientific expertise into data science workflows. Kate Crawford and dana boyd (2011) Hanna Wallach (2014), and Justin Grimmer (2015), to name a few, have developed research programs that model this interdisciplinary work. Grounded in many aspects of the humanities, cultural analytics and computational humanities research only flourishes in Information Science departments in the U.S. Practitioners in humanities departments struggle to find community in their home institutions, even those with data science programs. In this talk, I urge us to use this moment of AI’s marketing as a ‘cultural technology’ to build mutually reinforcing interdisciplinary collaborations that both address and overcome the history of unequal methodological integration for social sciences and humanities in machine learning research. Meredith Martin is Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton, which started under her leadership in 2014. Her book, The Rise and Fall of Meter, Poetry and English National Culture, 1860-1930 (Princeton UP, 2012), was the winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book, the Warren Brooks Prize for Literary Criticism, and co-winner of the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for the Best First Book in Victorian Studies. Her second book Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody (Princeton UP, 2025) was published in April 2025 and argues that poetry can teach us how to think critically about data, and that critical data studies can teach us something about how we read poems. With several collaborators, she has been building and directing, since 2007, the Princeton Prosody Archive, which contains writing on poetics, prosody, rhetoric, grammar, speech, and literary history published between 1570-1923. In 2015, Martin received the Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship for research on her project Before We Were Disciplines: Poetry at the Origin of Language. She is also co-writing Data Work in the Humanities with Zoe LeBlanc, Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and former CDH Post-Doctoral Fellow, and co-writing Beyond the Walled Gardens with Dr. Mary Naydan and Dr. Rebecca Koeser, both colleagues at the Center for Digital Humanities. She is co-PI, with Associate Research Scholar Wouter Haverals, of the Exercises in Literary Style project, funded with a grant from the Princeton Language and Intelligence Initiative. In partnership with the Central New York Humanities Corridor, and in collaboration with the Cornell Media Studies Program, The Society for the Humanities sponsors an annual digital humanities lecture series delivered by invited speakers. We thank Lindsay Thomas (English) and the faculty in the Digital Humanities Initiative for assisting with this year's event. Meredith Martin will also lead a workshop for up to 20 interested graduate students on Friday, April 17, from 9:30-11:00am at the A.D. White House. Grad students can email the Society's Manager, Julie McLean (jzm6@cornell.edu) for the RSVP link.