Dr. Ryan Heuser

About me

I am Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Cambridge, where I teach for Cambridge Digital Humanities and the Faculty of English. I am a literary historian and computational humanist with fifteen years of experience in researching and teaching in the digital humanities.

My research and pedagogy span topics from the history and theory of DH to its methodological groundings in data science and visualization, natural language processing, network theory, machine learning, and large language models. My work focuses on computational approaches to prosody and rhythm, literary and intellectual history, and the history and impact of artificial intelligence on language.

I completed my PhD in English from Stanford University in 2019, where I was a founding member of the Stanford Literary Lab and its Associate Research Director from 2011 to 2015. From 2019-2022 I was Junior Research Fellow in King’s College, Cambridge, where I supervised students in English literature and Practical Criticism, taught workshops in the Center for Digital Humanities, and helped to review and establish its MPhil program. From 2022-2024 I was Research Software Engineer in Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities.

You can also find me on CDH, Github, Google Scholar, or by email at rj416@cam.ac.uk.

Projects

Generative Humanities

Ongoing research project beginning from the conviction that, just as digital humanities became necessary in order to theorize the rising digitisation practices in the 1980s and ’90s, a ‘generative humanities’ has become necessary to theorize rising generative AI practices in the 2020s. A first research article is forthcoming in October 2025: ‘Generative Formalism: Measuring Formal Stuckness in AI Verse’ (Journal of Cultural Analytics, special issue on Computational Formalism forthcoming Oct 2025). It theorizes a generative formalism, practicing it in a comparative distant reading of historical and generative poetic corpora, which identifies a persistent ‘formal stuckness’ on strict rhyme and meter in AI verse – a kind of formal gravition recombining historical cultural production for its own computational-aesthetic ends. The project is currently transforming into a collaborative grant proposal on ‘slop,’ extending the analysis of formal stuckness from poetry to prose, art, music, and video.

Abstraction: A Literary History

My first book project, Abstraction: A Literary History, traces a slow-moving rise and fall in abstract language across centuries of literary history. Mixing close and distant reading, the book uncovers how these changes in literary semantics mediate changes in social organization. I focus on three literary forms of abstract language: ‘abstract style’, in the syntactic symmetries and semantic formulae of the periodical essay; ‘abstract persons’, in the personified abstractions of the mid-century ode; and ‘abstract realism’, in the “tell, don’t show” narration of the early realist novel. Through this history and framework, the book also aims to recuperate abstraction as both a method and an object of literary study.

Antimetricality

I am working with Arto Anttila and Paul Kiparsky, metrical phonologists at Stanford, to design tools to evaluate the ‘antimetricality’ of a text: the degree to which its stress patterns depart from any known metrical pattern. Such measurements of metrical ‘tension’ or ‘ambiguity’ have a history: prose most distances itself rhythmically from verse at the height of the eighteenth century. We have a pre-print of a paper available here.

Publications

Reprinted in Canon/Archive: Studies in Quantitative Formalism from the Stanford Literary Lab, ed. Franco Moretti (New York: n+1, 2017):

Archive

Word Vectors in the Eighteenth Century

This page is meant as a set of links and resources related to my work using word vectors to study eighteenth-century literature. This work asks the question: how can new vector-based models of semantics reveal the historicity of specific configurations of meaning in eighteenth-century literature? Most of this work is published serially as blog posts, linked below. The later of these are “slideshow essays”-experiments with the forms of visual rhetoric that work so well in the digital humanities-rather than traditional blog posts. There is also a video of a talk I’ve given about this work. Lastly, I’ve uploaded several word2vec models I’m using, trained on a corpus of eighteenth-century literature; and linked to some relevant code (more code will be coming soon).

Graphs

Tools

Teaching

CV