Current Position

Assistant Research Scientist Johns Hopkins Department of Computer Science

I perform and direct research at the intersection of humanities topics and natural language processing. I am also an affiliate of the Johns Hopkins Center for Language and Speech Processing.

Lecturer Johns Hopkins Center for Digital Humanities

I teach courses on the design and implementation of humanities machine learning experiments.

Education

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

Dissertation: Speech as Writing: Literary Dialect Orthography in the United States 1790- 1930

B.A. in English University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Highest Honors

Publications And Presentations

Publication: "Examining Language Modeling Assumptions Using an Annotated Literary Dialect Corpus" NLP4DH 2024 @ EMNLP
Presentation: “LLMs and Nonstandard Orthography” SHEL-13
Presentation: “Towards Automatic Alignment of Literary Orthographic Variants” ADHO DH 2024
Publication: “Pairing Orthographically Variant Literary Words to Standard Equivalents Using Neural Edit Distance Models” LaTech-CFL 2024 @ EACL
Presentation: “How well do pretrained LLMs handle variant literary orthography?” New Directions in Text as Data (TADA) 2023
Presentation: “Towards a History of Variant Literary Orthography: BERT-based Normalization of 19th Century Spelling” ACH 2023
Presentation: with Sam Backer, “Blackface and Romance: Computing Cultural Change in 19th Century Sheet Music” AHA 2024
Presentation: “Pretrained Transformer Models for the Alignment of Orthographic Variants” MASC-SLL (2022)
Presentation: “BERT: Structure and Knowledge” CLSP Large Language Model Bootcamp (2022)
Publication: “Pym’s Games” in Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation (Volume 47)
Presentation: “Poe, Gaming and the Remediation of Horror Tropes” UC Davis Contours of Algorithmic Life conference (2014)

Leadership and Service

ACL SIGHUM: Liaison Representative 2024

Reviewer: ACL Rolling Review 2024

Reviewer: LaTeCH-CLfL-2024 2024

Reviewer: 8th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP 2023

Panel moderator: UCLA EPIC Humanities Now: Transformative Teaching conference, Innovative Teaching with Technology Panel 2019

Graduate student member: UCLA faculty search committee (New Methods in Literary Criticism) 2018

Participant: UCLA Mellon Seminar – “Digital Gateway.” 2015

Honors and Awards

Alexander Grass Humanities Institute Faculty Fellow 2024-2025

UCLA Department of English Dissertation Fellowship 2019-2022

UCLA Graduate Summer Research Mentorship Fellowship 2013 and 2014