Ryan Heuser

@heuser.bsky.social

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Lapsed Catholic from Florida, vulgar marxist, digital humanist, phd'd @StanfordEnglish. Now Sr Research Software Engineer @kingsdigitallab. I make data about culture, occasionally teach, and write about forms of abstraction in literary history.

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boooo both ACLA and ASECS are virtual next year

Still working on the "marital suspense" question—the LLM's assessments of relationship likelihood don't rly match my own—but it's interesting how Austen's suggested + actual marital matches often form a cohesive social network. The invisible hand of the marriage market ties the community together.

Using the new Gemini "Flash" LLM—which supposedly can handle 1M tokens, tho I can get only ~90K words—to pose Qs of nearly an entire novel. Asking here for the potential & actual romantic relationships, to assess a hypothesis I've long held: that Austen invented marital suspense.

Any of my DH/techy friends know how to check which websites are included in LLM training data corpora (Common Crawl, The Stack/Pile, etc)? I just want a way to search the URLs included for poetry sites, but it's annoyingly kind of difficult. CC's index page/API returns 503 error. cc @tedunderwood.me

I've accepted a new position, finally solving a yearslong 2 body problem. As of this week I am Sr Research Software Engineer at King's Digital Lab based in King's College London. Looking forward to collaborating on some great digital humanities projects here. And if you're ever in London, hmu.

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Ryan Heuser

Its not just the new York Times. Even in Ireland, a country that suffered a genocidal famine, the media enages in this two side to the story rubbish. Herding people around like animals in the ruins of their homeland under the threath of death for months on end is NOT NORMAL.

Proud to have been part of the team that computationally analyzed the New York Times' biased coverage of Israel and Palestine. This is part of a broader effort by Writers Against the War On Gaza, who released today a tour-de-force exposé of NYT: newyorkwarcrimes.com

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Ryan Heuser

Importantly, this is not an isolated event. As e.g. Vincent Bevins showed with the mass killings of (supposed) communists in Indonesia, the NYT was readily explaining it away, as was the majority of Western press. Very important work here to proof these biases.

People compare ChatGPT w the first chat bot, ELIZA (1964), but there's a crucial diff in their "chat" form: ChatGPT doesn't ask you Qs, it answers "prompts". Whereas ELIZA was designed as a parody Rogerian psychotherapy's endless counter-Qs. Silly or no, ELIZA was dialogical; the ChatGPTs monologic.

Watching 00s music videos on MTV, which are silly and happy and/or raunchy, and it all feels so pre-financial crisis. A low interest rate phenomenon

A silly inconsequential opinion but sometimes comments are better than questions, when designed simply to redescribe the argument enthusiastically in slightly different terms & concepts—in other words what a seminar leader does, ie find clever ways to agree and say yes rather than comment to say no.

Sheesh, sorry

I'm very excited to share a new publication of mine, "Computing Koselleck: Modelling Semantic Revolutions, 1720–1960", in a new book from Cambridge UP edited by Pete de Bolla, "Explorations in the Digital History of Ideas." (DM me if you can't access the PDF.) www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...

Computing Koselleck: Modelling Semantic Revolutions, 1720–1960 (Chapter 12) - Explorations in the ...www.cambridge.org Explorations in the Digital History of Ideas - November 2023

Watching the November Noir collection on Criterion, and doesn't Alan Ladd look kinda like a 1940s Kyle Maclachlan? Acting styles overlap in some ways too: strong, deep-voiced, ebullient, but quietly so.

Dear Poets, what is preventing you from sounding like this?

Unless done subtly, with minimal claims, close reading is always a little cringe.

Hot take but I'm uncomfortable with "land" as a political abstraction, no matter who invokes it. The violence of 1948 and following can easily inhere in the local, concrete enormities of forcefully expelling people & villages, harassing them, assaulting them, occupying, killing. 1/3

Reading Jon Fosse for the first time while buzzed in a brewery, and I really appreciate the evolving paratactic stupor it lulls you into (‘the thought… won’t stop, it just keeps on circling around’). Pairs well with a loosening grip on cogency

Just stumbled again onto this fantastic 'co-citation' network of literary theory by @joncgoodwin.bsky.social: jgoodwin.net/network/cite...

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Ryan Heuser

Plotting Poetry -- the largest international conference on computational and quantitative poetics -- announces CFP for its 7th edition which will take place in Switzerland! www.plottingpoetry.org/conference/2...

Plotting Poetrywww.plottingpoetry.org

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Ryan Heuser

It all goes to show how infantilizing and useless the language of "innocence" really is. It's the wrong question. Culpability within any society is a spectrum, not a binary. But even a very large amount of individual culpability does not make somebody deserve death or torture!

The President of Israel is making the same argument Hamas does: everyone residing in our enemy's territory is in some way culpable for allowing the enemy to exist there and thus they are all fair targets.

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Please spread the word! The UIUC English Department is again hiring a tenure-track assistant professor in digital humanities, with a preference this year for applicants studying BIPOC communities, generative AI, and/or book history—our DH group is growing quickly! illinois.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

I know some people get uptight about letting cats outside because they kill little birds like sparrows. Have you seen a sparrow? They’re tiny. They’re dumb. There’re plenty. It’s alright

Both BARBIE and LITTLE WOMEN show embarrassment over a paradox in modern liberal/feminist storytelling. LITTLE WOMEN e.g. tried to have it both ways, the final romance with Jo and the writer ambiguously fictional/real (is that in book?), demeaned as pulp, embarrassed of its love. +

The sexlessness of BARBIE—not even toyish, head-and-neck-at-angle kisses! much less any gentital-free nudity or sex—is more than a major missed comedic opportunity. It’s another consequence of the film’s inability to complete its own political thinking, as was its clear but incoherent love for Ken.

In the possible/fictional world in which we’re inside a simulation UAP could be simulators observing/intervening as our sentient species heads to extinction in 100yrs or so. Maybe a contentious political/economic issue for them when valuable lab-grown sentience experiments near their end otherwise.

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Ryan Heuser

Reply to

Brandi K. Adams

Thank you. AAUP UMD did an independent financial analysis of the U of Maryland Headline: "UMD invests in athletics and higher management salaries, over teachers and staff." https://umdaaup.org/heres-whats-in-umds-wallet-the-results-of-the-comprehensive-independent-financial-analysis/

Here's What's in UMD's Wallet: The Results of the Comprehensive Independent Financial Analysis - UMD...umdaaup.org On April 22nd, 2022, UMD AAUP presented the results of our comprehensive independent financial analysis of the University of Maryland, College Park. Led by university finance expert Professor Howard B...

I’m not a friendless partnerless unemployed man but I do think it’s ironic that ‘boo hoo, just pull yourself together men & stop crying’ is the left/liberal reaction to droves of alienated, downwardly mobile men given that it’s that very reactionary discourse that is supposedly part of ‘toxic masc’.

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Ryan Heuser

Do you study politics, law, society, and/or culture and use computational analyses of documents to do so? Then, please consider submitting an abstract to TADA 2023! Abstract submissions are due August 11 (deadline extended!) Please share! https://tada2023.org/

TADA 2023: New Directions in Analyzing Text as Datatada2023.org

Paul Krugman—economist, blogger, apologist for the status quo and fearless defender of multinational corps—rates wage increases on lowest-paid food workers a likelier cause of food inflation than monopolistic corps’ explicit, earnings-calls confessions of price gouging and ongoing record profits.