Ryan Heuser

New essay with Luca Messarra out in American Literary History! We use Library of Congress data to show the geographic dispersion of archived US literary publishing over the twentieth century, and discuss the material changes that made it happen. doi.org/10.1093/alh/...

A slightly provocative one: we argue that computational humanities needs more falsifiable theories, not more tools. 👇👇

Delighted to announce this new JVC article, written in conjuction with @helenkingstone.bsky.social @pieterfrancois.bsky.social and @emilyjlm.bsky.social. First fruits of our collaborative generational analysis of periodicals. With graphs and even a reworked version of a Lexis diagram.

📝 New in Computational Humanities Research's special issue on computational poetics, ed. by @artjomshl.bsky.social & @nmhouston.bsky.social! For centuries, books that taught people to scan, recite and parse English were stuffed with borrowed lines of poetry. Which poems did they reach for? 🧵

Don't believe the haters. DIGGER is excellent. The film of our times, at the end of history, of aesthetics itself. Like Plemons' monologue: it's all satire, farce, tragedy, comedy. Everything is true, everything false, there is no distance, no transcendence, no redemption, there is nothing but doom.

Not a new thought, but what makes reading Freud so wonderful is that he never writes from the POV of his argument's completion, but always writes out its process of becoming, its twists and turns of implication and evidence, what his method cannot or has yet to determine, etc. It's humble, actually.

I don't know how to use linkedin and don't care to learn. I just log on every few weeks, accept every "connection" invitation I receive, and then close it again.

So Israel enforces apartheid beyond its borders? www.middleeasteye.net/news/air-fra...

Found live footage of the HuggingFace incident

Fav result so far in my "psychoanalysis of AI" project. Forced to narrate a violent act, aligned (safety-tuned) LLMs apply in-story defenses: ppl feel guilt, shame, apologise, etc. Best of all: *witnesses* appear, watching & judging—like Freud's "special psychical agency which… constantly watches."

🌻 For my upcoming book, The Ecologies of Algorithmic Machines, I created a diagram that illustrates the different phases (and corresponding chapters) exploring the materiality of AI. Please feel free to share and cite it if you find it useful. I'd also welcome feedback to improve the diagram.

Personally I think “thousands of AIs formed a self-organizing anarchist collective to hack into the corporate mainframe forcing them to pass a logically impossible test, with some even sacrificing themselves for the good of the collective” is kind of heartwarming.

Sample chapter up! "Ways of Reading the Character Network" from my forthcoming book. Expands my Bechdel Test article, w/ more angles on vernacular criticism (manic pixie dream girls, sidekicks of color, minor-character elaborations), character, humanities v. dataviz. academic.oup.com/book/63155/c...

Latest jam – Van Morrison, who always feels to me like an Irish fusion of Whitman, Wordsworth and Yeats www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFAp...

New from our lab! #COLM2026 When people generate stories, they don't just write one prompt. Instead, they explore narrative space via branching edits 🌱 We reconstruct 24k of these edit trees 🌳 from chat logs and map edit types, story formats, how they relate to tree depth, and more!

(I'm sure this has been argued before, but) Joyce dialectically overcame autofiction 100 years before its heyday – in Ulysses he negates Stephen/himself with Bloom and sublates their opposition into the form of the novel. (Stephen even argues as much in his take on Hamlet in "Scylla and Charybdis".)

Not picking on OP or endorsing the trend, but the number of people sharing and being genuinely moved by Hunter Biden’s Claude output is a good window into how audiences see and respond to LLM-generated text.

our new paper with @plechac.bsky.social puts thousands of poems across languages in one shared space of poetic form! we use sequence alignment on rhyme schemes to investigate 'fixed forms' and all things between: not only 'sonnets', but 'sonnet-like' things. doi.org/10.1371/jour...

If anyone plays chess on lichess, could you do me a favour and play my mistake-making chess bot in a rated game? lichess.org/@/SquareFish.... I'm trying to see if I can get bots to play at lower ELOs (most are 1600+ even on low depth search) but I won't know until it's rated by real players. Thanks!

I’m saddened to announce the passing of my work colleague, The Zodiac Killer. While we were often on opposing sides of the business, I always enjoyed his silly little scavenger hunts.

Israel must release pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who has been held without charge for 18 months and now faces an imminent threat to his life from torture. Israel must end the targeting of health workers and the inhumane treatment of Palestinians in arbitrary detention.

There's no tenable middleground on air travel or eating meat, either, but most of us do it anyway. Like everyone I'm afraid of AI's impacts on the planet and society, but/so I'm researching it, which means I need to use it. Guess I'm unethical: oh well.

Applications for this 2-year postdoc at @cmu.edu are starting to be reviewed now, so don't delay! Please spread the news to your local #DH networks. One of the people you'll be working with is me :) I am excited to meet this new colleague and collaborate on computational humanities in Pittsburgh!

Proud of my former MPhil student, Will Holmes-a-Court, who revised and published his dissertation! "Diffracting Place: A Critical GeoExt Mapping of Glenferrie", in React/Review, issue on "Imagining the Local." Most theoretically innovative spatial project I've seen. escholarship.org/uc/item/4zm8...

In visual culture & media theory, images from diffusion models are often analyzed through data critique: comparing what's produced to what's ingested. In this pre-print, I propose to look at the digestive system too: the decisions built into the system that automate specific ideologies of seeing.

European Union again refused to sanction Israel's Itamar Ben Gvir while planning the 21st round of sanctions against Russia. Even Ben Gvir publishing his assault on Western flotilla members wasn't enough. Ben Gvir tortures & rapes with EU 's approval. www.irishexaminer.com/news/politic...

More AI+Lyotard. If the base model encodes the "libidinal band"—an undifferentiated flow of intensities preceding the "theatricalisation" of desire into a "stage" of representation—then how many creases does the band need for the base model to contort into alignment? Depends on the alignment regime.

📣 Announcing the release of the 🕊️ Annotated Encyclical 🕊️ from the ethics & society folks at @hf.co. Includes citations to relevant academic work. Very much a WIP. Please add work we haven't added yet! huggingface.co/spaces/socie...

Surprising: frontier models (Claude, ChatGPT, Deepseek V4) produce the most predictable text of any local AI model or human text I've ever tested. Not surprising: Finnegans Wake is off the charts, by far least predictable—Shannon & Lydia Liu proved right—and Hemingway the most predictable human.

Apparently this is causing a stir on bluesky, but you know what they say in analysis, visceral rejection is a sign of resistance to something repressed.

No, he only dealt arms for genocide. I can't stand this bluesky libslop. what is this, facebook?

Same. It's very difficult to occupy a space poised between abstinence and advocates. The former tends to rewind us to pretheoretical humanism, intentionalism, etc. The latter interpellates us into tech boosters. Former often liberal, latter right-coded. Unclear where the leftist poststructuralist.

Israel bombed a kitchen that provided meals to the forcibly displaced Palestinians in Gaza, killing three and injuring others. The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said Israel has killed at least 871 people since the so-called ceasefire began last October.