When UWaterloo computer scientist dan brown came across a Wall Street Journal article analyzing the rhymes in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, he paused. Several years prior he and a former MMath student, Hussein Hirjee, had developed an algorithm for detecting rhymes in rap music lyrics; this article was essentially doing the same thing. It sent Brown down a Google rabbit hole to discover that applying algorithms to rhymes was happening more and more frequently as AI analysis and generation continued to develop.

A few years later, and after a few more instances like the above, brown put his researcher hat on, searching for a systematic literature review paper on algorithmic rhyme analysis. He hoped to find an overview of what had been written since his initial research. Such a paper would allow researchers to more easily build on past work, rather than duplicate what had already been done. There wasn’t one.

As a computer scientist with interests that often intersect with the humanities and social sciences, brown had previous experience in the various ways library staff can partner in both teaching and research on campus. As he considered the potential scope for completing a systematic review on his research topic, he reached out to Rebecca Hutchinson, the computer science librarian at Waterloo, to see if she could help.

Once brown was clear on his research question, Hutchinson guided him through structured conversations to develop a search strategy. “She knows the tools so well that as we were working through search terms — what to include and what to exclude — she can show me in real time the impacts of our different choices on the results that come back, which ultimately will impact the quality of our final paper,” says brown.