Ryan Heuser

1. The new batch of Epstein documents helps illuminate one contemporary controversy: What is Bari Weiss up to at CBS? I think the answer is she is trying to rehabilate the Epstein network as a bulwark of reactionary centrism. Let me explain.

Not sure I could bear to hear a student present on my own piece, but these are great, thanks Meredith!

Ooh, "good shout" as the Brits say, thanks Lee!

Thanks, that's very helpful!

2. Labour Loraine Daston, "Calculation and the Division of Labor, 1750-1950" (2021) File Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence (2021), pp. 53-87 File Adrienne Williams, "The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence" (2022) File Matteo Pasquinelli, The eye of the master: a social history of artificial intelligence (2023), pp. 1-22 File 3. Language N. Katherine Hayles, "Inside the Mind of an AI: Materiality and the Crisis of Representation" (2022) File Ellie Pavlick, "Symbols and grounding in large language models" (2023) File Beatrice M. Fazi, "The Computational Search for Unity: Synthesis in Generative AI" (2024) File Leif Weatherby, Language machines: cultural AI and the end of remainder humanism (2025), pp. 101-121 File

4. Ethics Yarden Katz, Artificial whiteness: politics and ideology in artificial intelligence (2020), pp. 153-182 File Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence (2021), pp. 23-52 File Roberto Navigli et al, "Biases in Large Language Models: Origins, Inventory, and Discussion" (2023) File Abeba Birhane, "The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research" (2022) File 5. Intimacy Sherry Turkle, Alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other (2011), pp. 1-20 File Molly Smith et al, "Can Generative AI Chatbots Emulate Human Connection? A Relationship Science Perspective" (2024) File Hannah Kirk et al, "Why human–AI relationships need socioaffective alignment" (2025) File

6. Aesthetics Lev Manovich and Emanuele Arielli, Artificial Aesthetics: Generative AI, Art and Visual Media (2024), 119-144 File Melanie Walsh et al, "Does ChatGPT Have a Poetic Style?" (2024) File Naomi Smith and Clare Southerton, "AI and Aesthetic Alienation: The Image and Creativity in Contemporary Culture" (2025) File

Teaching a class on Critical AI. Am I missing any key texts?

We already did Stochastic Parrots last term. I need 1 more reading each on "Aesthetics" and "Intimacy". And I'd rather not use Crawford twice.

Wow, friends with kids, your life changed after having kids?? You have less free time now?? You don't say! I had no idea!! Please, elaborate!

#DigitalHumanities job

I would always recommend letting your voice through, but now more than ever! I actually leap for joy these days at syntactic quirks, even grammatical mistakes... any linguistic sign of human life. Reminds me of the Japanese philosophy of "kintsugi": the cracks in the vase are what give it character.

You're right, Seth. Venting is not only necessary—it's healthy. We all need to remember to take time to smell the roses! ☺️🌹

To be honest, I've tried a handful of times, but AI gives top marks to almost everyone, it's uncritically positive. I guess negativity is our most human trait

Love reading dozens of MPhil applications written in an identical, bland style... Prose used to have style, it actually told you something about the writer... Buffon's "Le style est l'homme même" is dead, and AI has killed it.

This is the Democratic playbook in a nutshell: fundraise off fascism.

If only Democrats had actually believed in abolishing ICE like they said they did in 2020. Or, if only believed in anything at all

Man of Feeling?

A four-panel figure showing the probability of predicting articles from The Journal of Philosophy versus PMLA using quarter-century models. Each panel represents a different training period (1925-1950, 1950-1975, 1975-2000, 2000-2025). Gray shaded regions indicate training periods. The model trained on early C21 philosophy vs literature cannot accurately distinguish early C20 philosophy vs literature, but the reverse is not true.

Hierarchical cluster of syntactic features predicting philosophy (blue) vs criticism (red).

Top 2 distinctive features for Philosophy vs Criticism.

An example of the importance of the "marker" feature in philosophy.

Analytic philosophy can be distinguished from literary criticism with 90-95% accuracy via syntax alone. Moreover, a classifier trained to separate them in early C20 does better predicting future separations than a C21 one predicts past ones, suggesting philosophy syntax narrows/specializes in ~C21.

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.”

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.

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.

(Data gratefully sourced from @tedunderwood.com and @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy's brilliant article,
www.jstor.org/stable/24542...)

I'm tempted to make the course a lab and see if we can't "close read" these instances of "[adjective] reading" to annotate and categorize them into schools, attitudes, theories of "reading". If we can do that we could also try to write a short paper on it together & submit as a multi-author article.

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.

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...

@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

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.

Who would train those models, tho? Even llama3 was estimated at $720M. Not sure how much inference costs but NSF funding for open access does seem more feasible. But all of this relates to socializing the means of production only insofar as they are used for socialized not privatized production, no?

The national (mostly US) basis of tech sector despite its international reach has already created a ton of contradictions for int'l regulation; not sure how we could globally socialize AI? And not sure NSF would go for spending 22% of its budget on 1 model, but it'd be cool to have a "public" model.

But if a model takes $2B to train (estimated cost for GPT-5), how can we socialize AI without first socializing the entire tech sector? But I take your point, I do think the left needs to think more creatively about socialist possibilities in AI era.

Woops. Well, it works just as well. Maybe better

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.

Is there a list of collaborationist unis out there? So many now it's hard to keep track

Would the digital humanities community like to have their own section on arxiv? Pros/cons?

ah! I see what you mean