Dr. Jacob Murel joins Logion Project

Princeton Classics is delighted to welcome Dr. Jacob Murel to the team of the Logion Project, a natural language processing tool aiding in the restoration of premodern Greek texts. The first Research Software Engineer hired by an East Pyne language department, Dr. Murel will work to make Logion more accessible to philologists while improving and diversifying its performance.

“I am elated to work on Logion alongside Barbara, Johannes and its cadre of student researchers,” said Murel, whose undergraduate honors thesis was a comic book adaptation of Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid. “Indeed, I am grateful for this wonderful, fabulous opportunity to return to my first academic love—Classics—now equipped with the expertise in digital research I have gained through my professional odyssey.”

That odyssey has included a wide range of projects taking a computational approach to historical texts. Dr. Murel’s dissertation, in the English department at Northeastern University, used computational text analysis to explore text reception in early medical practice. Later, as a member of the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative, he developed methods for improving handwritten text recognition of Arabic. 

Dr. Murel has also assisted digital research projects with the Women Writers Project, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and in a range of fields from comics studies to early modern paleography. His next goal is to put these skills to use expanding Logion’s capacities.

“In addition to its philological applications, I am intrigued by Logion’s potential implications for illuminating textual reception and circulation,” he said, “as well as how Logion can address longstanding questions of interpretability and source attribution in machine learning.”

Like much research in classics, Murel observes, this work invites collaboration. 

“If anyone wants to talk about their own interest in digital research with regard to classical studies, I am more than happy to serve as a resource. My (metaphorical) door is open.”