Projects
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Indus Script Sign FunctionsMuch of my Indus research attempts to answer a fairly narrow question: which signs in the script behave more like syllabic signs, and which behave more like logograms? I approach that question computationally, using statistical and distributional patterns in the corpus to identify these differences.
This is the line of work behind the IJCA paper and a follow-up now under review at Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage. The broader Indus work was supported in part by an Emergent Ventures grant in 2025.
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Semantic Roles in Indus Sign ClustersA second Indus project, under the mentorship of Rajesh Rao, asks a different question: what semantic roles do recurring sign clusters serve?
The point here is to avoid making linguistic assumptions about the script. Instead of beginning with a proposed language or decipherment, I assign possible semantic roles to clusters entirely from statistical and distributional evidence: where they occur, what they co-occur with, and how they pattern across the corpus.
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Proto-Dravidian Lexical Database — TU BerlinAt Technische Universität Berlin, I spent the summer building a structured database of reconstructed Proto-Dravidian vocabulary under the supervision of Andreas Fuls and Martin Kada.
This work was conducted by compiling existing research and also by using AI and computational tools to automate the process of reconstructing proto words. One book chapter from that project is forthcoming in fall 2026.
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The Evolution of Written Chinese, 1910–1945A computational study of Chinese-language newspapers from the Republican era, tracking how written Chinese shifted across a period of political and social change.
This grew out of work I started at the New York Historical Society and is now under review at the Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities. Read the Research Square preprint →
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Mount Zion Cemetery — GIS Mapping & Digital ArchiveMount Zion and Female Union Band Cemetery is one of the oldest African American cemeteries in Washington, D.C. I compile archival material tied to the cemetery and create interactive maps, geospatial datasets, and public digital resources.
That has included a map of Mount Zion/FUBS, a separate map of the historic Wilberforce neighborhood, and related digital archive work.
Mount Zion/FUBS map →
Historic Wilberforce neighborhood map → -
The Creation of Chinese America — Digital ExhibitAt the New York Historical Society, I did historical research in collaboration with other interns on The Chinese American, one of the earliest newspapers for Chinese Americans, and built a public-facing digital exhibit titled The Creation of Chinese America to present my findings.
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Brahmi Script: Origins in the Indus ValleyAn independent research paper examining the hypothesis that Brahmi — the ancestor of nearly all South and Southeast Asian writing systems — derived from the Indus Script. Available as a preprint.