Craig Messner

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Curriculum Vitae

Download as PDF · craig.messner@gmail.com · github.com/messner1

Current Affiliations

Lecturer Johns Hopkins University Center for Digital Humanities
2023 – present
I am a member of the Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute and an affiliate of the Johns Hopkins Center for Language and Speech Processing.
Assistant Research Scientist Johns Hopkins University Department of Computer Science
2024 – present
Secondary appointment.

Education

Ph.D. in English Literature University of California, Los Angeles
2012 – 2021
Dissertation: Speech as Writing: Literary Dialect Orthography in the United States 1790–1930. Employed language modeling to examine literary uses of nonstandard English.
B.A. in English University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2008 – 2012
Highest Honors.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

  1. Elisabeth Fittschen, Sabrina Xin Li, Tom Lippincott, Leshem Chosem and Craig Messner. “Pretraining Language Models for Diachronic Linguistic Change Discovery.” Findings of EACL 2026. doi:10.18653/v1/2026.findings-eacl.241
  2. Craig Messner, Tom Lippincott. “Transferring Extreme Subword Style Using Ngram Model-Based Logit Scaling.” NLP4DH 2025 @ NAACL. doi:10.18653/v1/2025.nlp4dh-1.24
  3. Craig Messner, Tom Lippincott. “Examining Language Modeling Assumptions Using an Annotated Literary Dialect Corpus.” NLP4DH 2024 @ EMNLP. doi:10.18653/v1/2024.nlp4dh-1.32
  4. Craig Messner, Tom Lippincott. “Pairing Orthographically Variant Literary Words to Standard Equivalents Using Neural Edit Distance Models.” LaTeCH-CLfL 2024 @ EACL. doi:10.18653/v1/2024.latechclfl-1.26
  5. Craig Messner. “Pym’s Games.” Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation, Volume 47.

Recent Presentations

  1. “Evaluating the Use of Synthetic Data in Humanities Pretraining.” New Directions in Text as Data (TADA) 2026.
  2. “LLMs and Nonstandard Orthography.” Society for the History of the English Language (SHEL-13) 2024.
  3. “Towards Automatic Alignment of Literary Orthographic Variants.” Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations DH Conference 2024.
  4. “How well do Pretrained LLMs handle variant literary orthography?” New Directions in Text as Data (TADA) 2023.
  5. “Towards a History of Variant Literary Orthography: BERT-based Normalization of 19th Century Spelling.” Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) 2023.
  6. “Pretrained Transformer Models for the Alignment of Orthographic Variants.” MASC-SLL 2022.

Recent Invited Tutorials, Talks and Workshops

  1. “Deep Humanities LLM Research: Getting in to Interpretability.” Humanities of AI Workshop: Intelligence and Imitation: Mind, Mechanism, Mimesis, April 2026. Slides
  2. “Should I use an LLM in my Research?” Penn Libraries, April 2026. Slides
  3. “Finetuning in Humanities AI/ML.” Experimental Language Modeling (ELM) Lab, Morgan State University, February 2026.
  4. “What Does DH Mean to You?” JHU Digital Humanities Workshop, September 2024.

Courses Taught and Developed

AS.360.306/606: Computational Intelligence for the Humanities Johns Hopkins University
  • Developed and taught for three semesters (Spring 2024, 2025, 2026). Aimed at both undergraduate and graduate learners.
  • Focuses instruction around a capstone project that combines literary or historical research with empirical analysis using AI/ML methods.
  • Builds skills in interpreting both traditional literary/historical forms and models as interpretable artifacts by combining research with written analysis.
  • Has led to multiple further research collaborations with participants.
  • Course materials on GitHub
AS.360.305/605: Introduction to Computational Methods for the Humanities Johns Hopkins University
  • Contributed development effort during 2024. Aimed at early undergraduate learners.
  • Teaches computation (Python) in a humanistic frame by focusing on both text and programs as interpretable artifacts.
English 4W: Critical Reading and Writing – What Was Writing? UCLA
  • Developed and taught for a total of seven quarters, 2016–2017 and 2021. Aimed at early undergraduate learners.
  • Designed around a mix of rapid, rubric-guided academic writing and computational research exercises.
  • Builds critical writing competency across form (prose, poetry) and medium (text, video, interactive).

Courses Taught

  • Major American Authors
  • Literature in English 1850–Now
  • Literature in English to 1700
  • Shakespeare's Later Plays
  • Science Fiction
  • Contemporary American Fiction
  • Introduction to Digital Humanities

Leadership and Affiliations

2024 –Member: Johns Hopkins University Data Science and AI Institute (DSAI)
2024 –Affiliate: Johns Hopkins University Center for Language and Speech Processing
2024 – 2026Liaison Representative: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Special Interest Group on Language Sciences for the Socio-Economic Sciences and the Humanities (SIGHUM)
2024 – 2025Co-facilitator: Johns Hopkins University Digital Humanities Workshop

Service

2026 –Member: JHU Krieger School of Arts and Sciences AI Workshop Program Committee
2026 –Reviewer: Conference on Language Modeling (COLM)
2024 –Program Committee member: NLP4DH Conference
2024 –Program Committee member: SIGHUM LaTeCH-CLfL Workshop
2024 –Reviewer: ACL Rolling Review
2024Reviewer: LaTeCH-CLfL 2024
2023Reviewer: 8th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP
2019Panel moderator: UCLA EPIC Humanities Now: Transformative Teaching conference, Innovative Teaching with Technology panel
2018Graduate student member: UCLA faculty search committee (New Methods in Literary Criticism)
2015Participant: UCLA Mellon Seminar, “Digital Gateway”
2014, 2015Instructional Assistant: Beyond the Digitized Slide Library: Summer Institute on Digital Humanities and Art History

Honors and Awards

2024 – 2025Alexander Grass Humanities Institute Faculty Fellow
2019 – 2022UCLA Department of English Dissertation Fellowship

Prior Experience

Postdoctoral Researcher Johns Hopkins Center for Digital Humanities
September 2021 – July 2023

Supervisor: Professor Tom Lippincott

  • Developed a novel annotated dataset of non-standard English language literary works.
  • Executed a research program that probed large language model knowledge of English dialects.
  • Designed and implemented a computational humanities curriculum.
Teaching Assistant UCLA Department of English
2015 – 2021, 2013 – 2014
  • Courses taught include early United States literature, science fiction, survey courses covering 19th and 20th century anglophone literature, and writing composition.
  • Designed and solo taught a DH-centric critical reading and writing course.
Teaching Assistant UCLA Digital Humanities Program
September 2018 – December 2018
  • Facilitated technical lab sessions for an introduction to digital humanities class. Designed technical and theoretical instructional materials.
Research and Instructional Technology Consultant UCLA Humanities Technology
2014 – 2015
  • Supported a Moodle-based educational content management system.
  • Trained faculty in the use of software tools for both pedagogy and research.
  • Provided programming and data support for faculty research projects.
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