I'm a junior at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. I'm primarily interested in the digital humanities, computational linguistics, history, and data science. Most of my projects center on applying computational methods to questions in language and history, including but not limited to undeciphered scripts, reconstructed languages, and archives.

Lately that has mostly meant the Indus Script, Dravidian historical linguistics, Republican-era Chinese newspapers, and archival history in Washington, D.C. I've worked at TU Berlin, Mount Zion-Female Union Band Society Cemeteries, and the New York Historical Society. My research has also been supported by an Emergent Ventures grant.

Outside of these projects, I run cross-country and track, play violin (with a passion for klezmer), and spend quite a bit of time listening to ska and rocksteady records and Woody Guthrie. I've also been studying Yiddish over the past couple of years and have been compiling a collection of my favorite Yiddish curses and expressions.

Current work

Selected publications

  • Identifying Candidate Syllabic Sign Pairs in the Indus Script: A Computational Analysis of High-Frequency Sign Pairs
    Merriam, L.L. — Under review, Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage
  • Computational Analysis of the Indus Script: Identifying Sign Functions in Logo-Syllabic Writing Systems
    Merriam, L.L. and Khanna, R.A. — International Journal of Computer Applications, 2025. DOI →
  • The Evolution of Written Chinese (1910–1945): A Computational Study of Newspapers
    Merriam, L.L. — Under review, Journal of Open Humanities Data Research Square preprint →

Full publication list →