Ryan Heuser
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heuser.bsky.social
Ryan Heuser
@heuser.bsky.social
1.9K followers 2K following 250 posts
Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities @camdighum.bsky.social. Florida man abroad, lapsed Catholic, vulgar marxist; phd'd Stanford English, alum of Literary Lab. I make data about culture and write about forms of abstraction in (C18) literary history.
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heuser.bsky.social
Ryan Heuser @heuser.bsky.social · Oct 13
Excited to share my latest publication, "Generative Aesthetics: On formal stuckness in AI verse." It's published in a special issue in the Journal of Cultural Analytics, expertly edited by Tess McNulty and Laura Chapot, on "Computation and Form, Reconsidered."
culturalanalytics.org/article/1448...
Generative Aesthetics: On formal stuckness in AI verse | Published in Journal of Cultural Analytics
By Ryan Heuser. This paper examines the formal and aesthetic patterns of AI-generated poems through a series of computational experiments.
culturalanalytics.org
Reposted by Ryan Heuser
tedunderwood.com
I don't think the data comes very near the present.

But I’m actually giving a talk today where part of the argument is “AI dissolves the particular division of labor that made the opposition of distant and close make sense.”

I added a slide with an image to Ryan’s data.
Line chart titled “Frequency of ‘close reading’ and ‘distant reading’ in literary studies, R. Heuser’s data.” The x-axis shows decades from the 1920s through the 2010s; the y-axis shows the moving average of frequency among adjective–reading pairs (percent). A blue line labeled “close” rises steadily across the century, from roughly 1% in the 1920s to nearly 19% in the 2010s, with especially sharp growth after the 1950s. A red line labeled “distant” appears only in the 2000s and 2010s, increasing modestly from well under 1% to around 1.4%. The contrast highlights the long, dominant rise of “close reading” versus the recent, comparatively small emergence of “distant reading.”
December 18, 2025 at 6:37 PM
heuser.bsky.social
Overall, the usage of "reading" in literary studies articles in 2010s (74/1000 words) is 2x what it was in 1920s (34/1000).

Within "reading", the use of "[adjective] reading" in the 2010s is 1.4x in the 2010s (310 "reading"'s) what it was in 1920s (220).

Within "[adjective] reading" = quoted plot.
Title: History of "reading" in Anglophone literary studies, 1920-2020 X-axis: Publication decade of research articles across seven leading literary studies journals. Y-axis: The relative usage of particular "[adjective] reading" in a given decade (moving average for clarity). Labels: "Reading"'s highest usage decade as a ratio to its lowest-usage decade Sources: Literary studies journal data from Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood, 'The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us', New Literary History, 45.3 (2014). Journals included: PMLA, Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, ELH, Modern Language Review, Review of English Studies, Modern Philology. Data sourced from JSTOR Data for Research request. Annotation: "reading" 2010s (74 FPK) = ~2.2x of 1920s and 1960s (34 FPK) Title: Part of speech distribution in "[word] reading" in Anglophone literary studies, 1920-2020X-axis: Publication decade of research articles across seven leading literary studies journals.Y-axis: The relative usage of particular "[part-of-speech] reading" in a given decade.Labels: Highest-usage decade as a ratio to its lowest-usage decadeSources: Literary studies journal data from Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood, 'The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Could Tell Us', New Literary History, 45.3 (2014). Journals included: PMLA, Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, ELH, Modern Language Review, Review of English Studies, Modern Philology. Data sourced from JSTOR Data for Research request.Legend Annotations on chart:"[article] reading" (e.g. the reading, her reading, ...) 1920s (262/1000) = ~2x of 2010s (133/1000)"[adjective] reading" (e.g. correct reading, close reading, ...) 2010s (310/1000) = ~1.4x of 1920s (220/1000)"[verb] reading" (e.g. was reading, rejected reading, ...) 1960s (92/1000) = ~1.9x of 1920s (49/1000)"[preposition] reading" (e.g. of reading, in reading, ...) 2010s (206/1000) = ~1.7x of 1920s (121/1000)
December 18, 2025 at 12:43 PM
heuser.bsky.social
The relative usages of "[adjective] reading" in Anglophone literary studies journals, 1920-2020. Made for my "Prac Crit" course next term, "[Adjective] Reading". Interactive version here: public.tableau.com/views/Adject...
Line graph showing the history of different types of '[adjective] reading' in Anglophone literary studies from 1920-2020. The x-axis represents publication decades, while the y-axis shows the percent of '[adjective] reading' instances in literary studies journals as a 9-decade moving average. Multiple colored lines track various reading methodologies over time. 'Close reading' shows the most dramatic rise, peaking around 2010 at approximately 18% (33 times its 1920s usage). 'Original reading' dominated the 1920s at 7.6% but declined to 0.5% by the 2010s. Other notable methodologies include 'careful reading' (peaked 1960s), 'critical reading' (peaked 1980s), 'wide reading' (1920s), 'correct reading' (1930s), 'new reading' (1950s), 'feminist reading' (1990s), 'textual reading' (2000s), 'distant reading' (2010s), and 'nuanced reading' (2010s). Each labeled point includes the decade of peak usage, the percentage at peak, and the ratio compared to its lowest-usage decade. Data sourced from JSTOR across seven leading literary studies journals including PMLA, Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, ELH, Modern Language Review, Review of English Studies, and Modern Philology.
December 17, 2025 at 3:59 PM
Reposted by Ryan Heuser
wouterhaverals.bsky.social
@jbarre.bsky.social, @oseminck.bsky.social, Antoine Bourgois, and @tpoibeau.bsky.social built a detective detector, tracing the different archetypes in French detective fiction #CHR2025
December 12, 2025 at 12:20 PM
heuser.bsky.social
Amazing papers at #CHR2025; particularly enjoying the computational literary studies. An observation: questions about genre as a confounding factor seem to keep coming up. I do wonder if (and I'm also guilty of this) CLS can fixate on the x-axis of history and we ought to give genre more attention.
December 12, 2025 at 11:24 AM
heuser.bsky.social
Preparing talk on this for #CHR2025 by addressing an oversight in the paper: assessing impact of model temperature on generative poems' rhyme. As expected, temp negatively correlates. The effect is significant, but very weak (R2=0.02), suggesting "formal suckness" is largely invariant to model temp.
Two-panel scatter plot showing the relationship between temperature and rhyming proportion in LLM-generated poem completions. Left panel shows llama3.1:instruct model (80% baseline rhyming) with shallow negative slope. Right panel shows llama3.1:text model (10% baseline rhyming) with shallow negative slope. Both show statistically significant (p<0.0001) but weak effects (pseudo R²=0.01-0.02).
December 7, 2025 at 4:28 PM
Reposted by Ryan Heuser
mariaa.bsky.social
Would the digital humanities community like to have their own section on arxiv? Pros/cons?
 Thomas Dietterich @tdietterich.bsky.social · 27d
This has been a challenge for cs.HC: we need folks to step up and support that category. Please contact me if you are interested in moderating either DH or HC! Thanks!
November 29, 2025 at 7:31 PM
heuser.bsky.social
Such a rich paper by @jeddobson.bsky.social on the challenges of "the interpretation of computational interpretations": i.e. interpreting cultural objects using methods like LLMs which are themselves so actively interpreting. Discussing it with my students tomorrow.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
While some might define the humanities by the objects of study (for example, the literary archive) and say that all forms of computational literary studies are humanistic by virtue of their objects of analysis, I am more concerned with assumptions about the ontological status of the object as such. In taking up interpretation as a core activity, we resolve a conflict into the method/object distinction introduced by the digital humanities. This conflict concerns the status of the model as the object of interpretation. When a scholar like John Guillory points out that the presence of scientific methods in humanistic approaches does not remove these analyses from the humanities because they are still focused on what he terms the “given object,” he assumes an isomorphic relation between the humanistic object (painting, text, etc) and the object under analysis (Guillory, 2016). The distinction between the constructed and given object in Guillory’s account assumes that when scientific methods are used to generate knowledge in the humanities, they are generating knowledge about the given object. Computational modeling erodes this distinction as statistical models are interpretations of constructed objects that, using Guillory’s terms, gesture toward the given object. Following Don Ihde’s notion of an expanded hermeneutics, a reading strategy that can be used to critique the interpretive function of scientific instruments, I propose that we can understand Transformers, as interpretive instruments (Ihde, 1998). If one considers computational instruments such as Transformers as hermeneutic in nature, then the way in which these methods re-present humanities objects cannot be ignored or assumed to be irrelevant to the question of interpreting the output alongside the modeled object. Computation has also introduced recursion into the object/method schema: the separation of objects from methods becomes increasingly hard to justify as methods produce objects, typically numerical models, that are then interpreted by other methods. I regard the interpretation of computational interpretations as a necessary component of any computational work within the humanities and thus privilege those methods that provide access to input data, parameters, and the nature of the transformations applied.
November 27, 2025 at 11:10 PM
heuser.bsky.social
Every few weeks I give bluesky a chance but then immediately see this sort of braindead liberalism (here, that pinkwashing empire is "infinitely better" than empire, etc etc). Anyway, back to twitter for me
irhottakes.bsky.social Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty @irhottakes.bsky.social · Nov 20
I hate this sort of meme.

“The only difference between the parties is whether the power to destroy human civilization rests in the hands of leaders who think gays, women, and black people should have their rights acknowledged.”

Even if true, how is Rainbow B-52 not infinitely preferable?
The infamous rainbow B-52 meme
November 20, 2025 at 8:33 PM
Reposted by Ryan Heuser
ayoub.bsky.social
Israel killed 3 Palestinians today

Israel is still not allowing UNRWA to deliver aid. UNRWA said they have enough food to supply Palestinians for 3 months. Israel hasn’t let them bring any aid into Gaza in 7 months.
October 16, 2025 at 10:43 AM
Reposted by Ryan Heuser
eve.gd
Exciting book out early next year! It will be open access 6 months after print publication. I have a chapter in there on shadow libraries as infrastructure.

Edited by @alanyliu.bsky.social, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies

www.upress.umn.edu/978151791608...
Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities
How digital humanities can shape and be shaped by the infrastructures that sustain our worldCritical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities reimagines...
www.upress.umn.edu
October 16, 2025 at 9:34 AM
Reposted by Ryan Heuser
culturalanalytics.bsky.social
🎉 We're excited to share the second half of our Special Issue "Computation and Form, Reconsidered"! 🟧
October 15, 2025 at 4:28 PM
heuser.bsky.social
Excited to share my latest publication, "Generative Aesthetics: On formal stuckness in AI verse." It's published in a special issue in the Journal of Cultural Analytics, expertly edited by Tess McNulty and Laura Chapot, on "Computation and Form, Reconsidered."
culturalanalytics.org/article/1448...
Generative Aesthetics: On formal stuckness in AI verse | Published in Journal of Cultural Analytics
By Ryan Heuser. This paper examines the formal and aesthetic patterns of AI-generated poems through a series of computational experiments.
culturalanalytics.org
October 13, 2025 at 3:50 PM
heuser.bsky.social
Glad to see the tide finally turning back to it being acceptable to say Taylor Swift makes bad music. Some of us have been holding the torch of hate in the darkness all this time
October 5, 2025 at 3:37 PM
Reposted by Ryan Heuser
dbamman.bsky.social
The UC Berkeley School of Information is hiring an assistant professor in the broad field of Information--including areas of info seeking/retrieval, digital humanities, cultural analytics, info viz, & philosophy of information (among others). Deadline Nov 1! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05014
Assistant Professor - Information - School of Information
University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!
aprecruit.berkeley.edu
September 23, 2025 at 2:43 PM
heuser.bsky.social
For the LA Times, two brilliant friends of mine wrote a brilliant take on the "Department of War" name change: that it's good.
nathanielzetter.bsky.social Nathaniel Zetter @nathanielzetter.bsky.social · Sep 19
I co-wrote a piece with T. Banerjee for the @latimes.com on the Department of Defense’s renaming. “Defense” has long made military action sound inevitable while masking its true objectives. Calling it “War” is more honest about American history—and could mean less military funding in the future.
Contributor: 'Department of War' is a more accurate label than 'Defense'
President Trump's idea to rename the department invites Americans to reckon more honestly with the nation’s use of military power.
www.latimes.com
September 19, 2025 at 7:59 PM
heuser.bsky.social
ICYMI: We are hiring an Associate/Full Professor in Digital Humanities at @camdighum.bsky.social. App deadline Sep 21. The position is for Deputy Director of CDH, and eventually Director on rotational basis. Please circulate/apply and let me know if you have any Qs! www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/about/news/n...
Now Hiring: Associate Professor/Professor in Digital Humanities - CDH
Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH) is currently recruiting for an Associate Professor/Professor in Digital Humanities from January 2026 or as soon as possible thereafter. The appointment may be made a...
www.cdh.cam.ac.uk
September 10, 2025 at 4:07 PM
heuser.bsky.social
Wow, Kamala really had her finger on the nation's pulse in trying to run to Trump's right on immigration, mocking him for not building the wall and pledging to build it.
jakemgrumbach.bsky.social Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · Sep 7
Highest level of support since Gallup started asking this question a quarter century ago
Americans' Views on Immigration's Effect on the U.S. On the whole, do you think immigration is a good thing or a bad thing for this country today? — % Good thing - - % Bad thing 100% 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 79 17 2001 2005 2010 2015 2020 2025 The percentages who volunteer that the effects are "mixed" or who do not have an opinion are not shown. GALLUP®
September 8, 2025 at 4:30 PM
heuser.bsky.social
FYI: We are hiring a 3-year research postdoc at @camdighum.bsky.social to study AI and the future of creativity. Application deadline Sep 21; more info below. Please circulate / apply! www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/about/news/r...
Now Hiring: Research Associate (Fixed Term) - CDH
Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH) seeks to appoint a postdoctoral researcher in Digital Humanities. The post will run for three years from Spring 2026. The successful candidate will work with Profess...
www.cdh.cam.ac.uk
September 6, 2025 at 4:52 PM
heuser.bsky.social
The @nytimes.com just can't stop repeating Israeli talking points
Even after his boss, President Trump, broke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and acknowledged “real starvation” in Gaza, Mr. Huckabee did not. “There is hunger and there are some serious issues that need to be addressed,” Mr. Huckabee said this past week at his official residence in central Jerusalem. But, he said, “it’s not like Sudan or Rwanda or other places where there has been mass starvation.” The Gaza Health Ministry has said scores of people, including many children, have died of malnutrition. ***It is not clear how many also had other illnesses.***
August 2, 2025 at 9:58 AM
heuser.bsky.social
The @nytimes.com prints genocide denial as 109 aid groups warn of mass starvation. Over 100 Palestinians have died from sheer hunger due to Israel's barbaric siege. 21 months of slaughter of a captive population. Gaza is a concentration camp and Israel is committing genocide: another Holocaust.
NYT Opinion Bret Stephens No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza July 22, 2025 Al Jazeera LIVE: Israel pounds Gaza; 109 aid groups warn of ‘mass starvation’ Palestinians wait to receive food from a charity kitchen, in Gaza City 02:57 No food, no aid: hunger is killing people in Gaza By Virginia Pietromarchi and Nils Adler Published On 23 Jul 2025 23 Jul 2025 Click here to share on social media Israeli forces continue bombarding Gaza as 109 aid groups call for action against Israel, warning that “mass starvation is spreading” across the enclave. At least 10 Palestinians have died of starvation in the past 24 hours in Gaza, bringing the death toll from hunger to 111, including at least 80 children, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry.
July 23, 2025 at 10:45 AM
heuser.bsky.social
Reports of 20 Palestinians starving to death in last 24 hours. Those who seek aid are shot. Tanks and drones patrol the rubble. But even AOC votes to send Israel 'defensive' aid, as if what Israel needs is more impunity.
July 22, 2025 at 1:15 AM
heuser.bsky.social
Trying to watch a bootleg cam of SUPERMAN (2025) because I heard it was anti-Israel but I have no idea wtf is going on. Is this a sequel? Was I supposed to watch every other Superman first, did I have homework? Is this just what comic book movies are like these days?
July 14, 2025 at 2:06 PM
heuser.bsky.social
Being forced to watch S3 of Sex and the City and it’s clear Carrie can’t commit to Aidan and has an affair with Big because Aidan does manual labor and Big is rich (i.e. princess fantasy). It’s about class, but the show represses that and makes it about universal hogwash like ‘emo. availability’ etc
June 30, 2025 at 3:55 PM
heuser.bsky.social
56% of Ukrainians would accept compromise with Russia to end the war. Over a million people have died; land isn't worth this much human life.
www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/...
War-weary Ukrainians ready for peace with Russia through compromise
A poll suggests 56 percent of Ukrainians would agree to a ‘compromise’ to end the conflict.
www.aljazeera.com
June 30, 2025 at 12:50 PM