Current Position

Lecturer: Johns Hopkins University Center for Digital Humanities

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 Deparment of Computer Science

Secondary appointment.

Education

Ph.D. in English Literature University of California-Los Angeles

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

Highest Honors

Peer-Reviewed Publications

1. Elisabeth Fittschen, Tom Lippincott, Leshem Chosem and Craig Messner "Pretraining Language Models for Diachronic Linguistic Change Discovery" Accepted to Findings of the EACL https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05523
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: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2401.15068
5. Craig Messner “Pym’s Games” in Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation (Volume 47)

Presentations

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

Teaching and Curriculum Development

Computational humanities courses developed and taught at Johns Hopkins:

• Introduction to Computational Methods for the Humanities: Introductory programming course with teaching goals centered around humanities computing
• Computational Intelligence for the Humanities: An introduction to machine learning and experimental methods for humanities students with a programming background. Course materials available here

While at UCLA, I also developed and taught a media studies-centric composition course. I also TA’ed for Introduction to Digital Humanities, and English courses including late 19th and early 20th century American literature, Science Fiction and Victorian literature.

Leadership and Affiliations

Member: Johns Hopkins University Data Science and AI Institute (DSAI) 2024-

Affiliate: Johns Hopkins University Center for Language and Speech Processing 2024-

Liaison Representative: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Special Interest Group on Language Sciences for the Socio-Economic Scieces and the Humanities (SIGHUM) 2024-2026

Co-facilitator: Johns Hopkins University Digital Humanities Workshop 2024-

Service

Program Committee member: NLP4DH Conference 2024-

Program Committee member: SIGHUM LaTeCH-CLfl Workshop 2024-

Reviewer: ACL Rolling Review 2024-

Reviewer: LaTeCH-CLfL-2024 2024