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 the work on this site comes from applying computational methods to think about 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. Parts of that work took shape 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. Louie Merriam with research supervisor Andreas Fuls at TU Berlin. With research supervisor Andreas Fuls at TU Berlin, summer 2025.

Current work

  • 2024–present  ·  Indus script published
    Much of my Indus research asks which signs in the script behave more like syllabic signs, and which behave more like logograms. It includes one published paper and a follow-up now under review at Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage.
  • 2025–present  ·  Indus script ongoing
    Under the mentorship of Rajesh Rao, this project asks what semantic roles recurring sign clusters serve, using only statistical and distributional evidence and no linguistic assumptions about the script.
  • 2025  ·  linguistics forthcoming
    At TU Berlin, I built a structured Proto-Dravidian lexical database under the supervision of Andreas Fuls and Martin Kada. One chapter from that work is forthcoming in fall 2026.
  • 2024–present  ·  digital humanities GIS
    Archival research, GIS mapping, and public digital resources for Mount Zion and Female Union Band Cemetery. MZION/FUBS map → Wilberforce map →
  • 2024  ·  digital humanities under review
    A newspaper-based study of how written Chinese changed between 1910 and 1945. Under review at the Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities. Research Square preprint →

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 Data Mining and Digital Humanities Research Square preprint →

Full publication list →