Ryan Heuser
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heuser.bsky.social
Ryan Heuser
@heuser.bsky.social
1.9K followers 2K following 240 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
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
I investigate whether training data can explain this effect, and find some evidence that it cannot. Instead, I find that "instruction-tuning" and Reinforcement Learning Human Feedback—designed to produce "helpful" chatbots—may instill conservative, "idealizing" aesthetic tendencies in the models.
Figure 5.Frequency of rhymed verse in poems detected in open and closed LLM training data. Points indicate mean likelihood; size indicates the number of poems per data point; whiskers show standard error. For comparison, I also reproduce similar results from Walsh, Preus, and Antoniak, who detect poems in both open and closed models by the identical procedure, in their case by querying for a more canonical sample from the Poetry Foundation (PF) and Academy of American Poets (AAP). Then, for all four cases (i.e., Chadwyck-Healey in open and closed datasets; PF/AAP in open and closed datasets), I measure rhyme in the poems discovered by these methods to be present or absent in the training data (Figure 5). Across all methods and datasets, the distribution of rhyme in poems found in LLM training data (shown in blue) is not disproportionately high compared to poems not found in that data (shown in red). A comparison of means between found and unfound poems’ rhyming shows in all cases either statistically insignificant differences or differences with small effect sizes. Moreover, though very few poems from the historical corpora used in this study were found in open LLM training data, those found even rhymed less often than those not found. These results suggest that LLMs’ tendency to overuse rhyme cannot be explained simply by an overrepresentation of rhyming poetry in their training data. Rather, this data points to something more fundamental in how these models process and generate poetic forms. Figure 9.Frequency of rhymed verse across generative completions of historical poems, one “instruction-tuned” and the other a raw next token generator. Points indicate mean likelihood; size indicates the number of poems per data point; whiskers show standard error. Figure 9 above shows that llama3.1:instruct rhymes far more often than its identically-trained llama3.1:text. Comparing the frequency of rhymed verse in these two variants of the same model shows that the raw text completion variant rhymes far less (with a statistically significant difference of means across all historical periods of the completed poems) than the one tuned to respond helpfully to user instructions. Does this helpful responsiveness push them, by accident, into more idealized aesthetic forms like rhythm and regular rhythm?
October 13, 2025 at 3:50 PM
heuser.bsky.social
As in work by @mellymeldubs.bsky.social et al, I examine formal tendencies in the poetic output of 9 LLMs. I find that LLM verse is "formally stuck" on rhyme & regular meter, producing these forms far more than even the formally strictest periods of literary history—and even when instructed not to.
Figure 1.Frequency of rhymed poems in the Chadwyck-Healey corpora compared with LLM-generated verse. Generative models were prompted for three types of poems: rhyming poems, unrhyming poems, and poems without specifying whether to rhyme. Points indicate mean likelihood; size indicates the number of poems per data point; whiskers show standard error. The left-hand portion of the graph shows that historically, across the 1,000 sampled poems per half-century in the Chadwyck-Healey poetry collections, the average likelihood for a poem to rhyme descends over time, particularly since the late nineteenth century. Prior to that, the historical incidence of rhymed verse hovers between 71% and 90% for three centuries, before turning away from it in the late nineteenth century (71%) and plummeting in the early twentieth (15%)—with ultimately only 7% of poems written by postwar poets in rhyme. Meanwhile, the right-hand portion of the graph, a distant reading of rhyme not in historical but generative verse, shows several striking findings. On average across the LLMs, prompts for a rhyming poem (shown in blue) and prompts simply for a poem without specifying whether to rhyme (shown in green) produce a body of artificial verse composed of 95% rhyming poetry. Not only is this incidence more than in any historical period of actual human-authored verse, but its similarity across these two categories of prompts suggests a remarkably stubborn association between the genre of poetry and the form of rhyme within these models. Furthermore, whether prompted simply to write a poem, a rhyming poem, or an unrhyming poem (shown in purple), generative models—despite the overwhelming bias in their training data toward the contemporary—rhyme more often than poets born in the late twentieth century, and sometimes significantly more. Finally, even prompting the models for an unrhyming poem yields rhyming poems 50% of the time on average across the models, more than seven times as often as in the … Figure 6.Frequency of syllable stress per syllable position into 10-syllable lines, drawn from historical and generative sonnets. Points indicate mean likelihood; whiskers indicate standard error. Even before attempting to metrically scan these syllable stresses, Figure 6 shows how generative sonnets arrange their unstressed and stressed syllables more regularly than in any known century of the form. That LLM imitations of Shakespeare’s sonnets (in red) dip much lower in syllable stress likelihood in the odd-numbered syllables and peak much higher in the even-numbered ones—more than any other sonnet source, including Shakespeare’s own—shows how inhumanly rigidly its syllable stresses adhere to an iambic pentameter metrical template. The second syllable in the line, for example, is stressed 62% of the time in twentieth-century sonnets; 63% Shakespeare; and 69% in pre-twentieth-century sonnets, partly given the more frequent use of traditional metrical variations like the trochaic inversion. But LLM verse stresses this syllable a striking 89% of the time, far exceeding the sonnets of any historical period from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. Although this syllable shows the largest difference between generative and historical sonnet meter, and although all sonnet sources rise in regularity toward the end of the line (a well-known phenomenon in metrics), generative sonnets maintain an historically unprecedented regularity in syllable stress across the line.
October 13, 2025 at 3:50 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
This is where Israel will put the flotilla aid, in their human starvation machine gun trap
At least 57 aid seekers among 120 Palestinians killed in Gaza in 24 hours https://aje.io/7dwhcc
June 11, 2025 at 12:53 PM
heuser.bsky.social
Seth, nooooo!!
bsky.app/profile/heus...
noooooo
June 3, 2025 at 11:51 AM
heuser.bsky.social
Why can't @aoc.bsky.social—the highest profile DSA-backed socialist in Congress who represents NYC—endorse Zohran Mamdani, the high profile DSA-backed candidate for NYC mayor *in close second place*? Ranked choice voting polls show Zohran at 46% in the final tally to Cuomo's 54%.
Ranked choice voting polls show Zohran Mamdani 46% in final tally to Cuomo's 54%.
May 29, 2025 at 5:05 PM
heuser.bsky.social
RIP Alasdair, a true Catholic Marxist
May 24, 2025 at 6:37 PM
heuser.bsky.social
Democrats are a death cult.
Three Democrats who would've made the losing vote 214-217 died in office this year. So basically, the budget Democrats have warned non-stop is a disaster will pass directly because of their insistence they stay in Congress until death.
May 22, 2025 at 11:04 PM
heuser.bsky.social
No food has entered Gaza since March 2, when Israel imposed total blockade. 2 months of intentional starvation, a flagrant war crime. Most in Gaza now eat 1 meal every 2 to 3 days. Israel said yesterday they will "intensify" war, occupy Gaza, and displace population.
www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/o...
A full-blown humanitarian emergency in Gaza is no longer looming. It is here, and it is catastrophic. It’s been more than two months since Israel cut off all humanitarian aid and commercial supplies into Gaza. The World Food Program delivered its last stores of food on April 25. Two million Palestinians in Gaza, nearly half of them children, are now surviving on a single meal every two or three days. At makeshift clinics run by my relief organization, American Near East Refugee Aid, signs of prolonged starvation are becoming more frequent and alarming. In the past 10 days, our lab technicians began detecting ketones, an indicator of starvation, in one-third of urine samples tested, the first time we have seen such cases in significant numbers since we began testing in October 2024. Food, fuel and medicine are exhausted or close to it.
May 6, 2025 at 10:47 PM
heuser.bsky.social
I'm supposed to go to the US next month for a wedding and a conference, but I might not go now—too afraid to cross the border. I tweet antizionist stuff and have a protest arrest record, supposedly wiped now but it once got me denied entry at Canadian border, which US border security probably knows.
'Treated like a criminal': US citizen says he was detained returning from Canada Bachir Atallah, a real estate attorney from New Hampshire, says he and his wife, Jessica Fakhri, were stopped crossing from Canada into Vermont.
April 15, 2025 at 5:11 PM
heuser.bsky.social
www.nbcnews.com/politics/202...
But her initial platform was also notable for what it was missing: a health care plan. For months, she had refrained from offering a specific plan on health care, instead echoing rhetoric from candidates like Pete Buttigieg that there were “a lot of different pathways” to achieve Medicare for All’s goals. It was only at the first Democratic debate in June, well into her rise, that she tied herself to the very specific approach envisioned by Sanders. “I’m with Bernie on Medicare for All,” she said after raising her hand to indicate she would abolish private insurance plans in favor of single-payer health care. As the months wore on, however, it became clear Medicare for All didn’t fit the winning formula that underscored the rest of her platform. Rather than simply taking from the ultra-rich, Medicare for All involved rerouting trillions of dollars in existing health care spending. Instead of handing voters a new benefit they didn't have before, it asked them to accept major changes to their existing health care based on more nuanced arguments, all of which were contested by rivals and industry groups. This was especially problematic for Warren, because the college-educated voters most attracted to her wonky populism were also the voters most likely to have coverage through work. Polls show Americans are mostly satisfied with their work plans, even as they worry about the overall system.
April 13, 2025 at 3:42 PM
heuser.bsky.social
The Left needs to abandon the left-liberal alliance if either is to defeat the Right.
catalyst-journal.com/2025/04/the-...
Here's the point: a bourgeois radicalization has no organic connection with or pathway to a socialist radicalization. The Left's disregard of the lack of historical synchronicity between them puts it in a perilous position when confronting an opposition that calls liberalism's bluff. The reason there is working-class dealignment in liberal political systems is because working-class people rightly understand that liberals do not represent them and do not share their values, nor do liberals care to have their support in the way they did fifty years ago. As the populist right calls this situation out for what it is, the Left faces a dilemma of whether to cleave to the left-liberal alliance at all costs or to accept the terms of political debate set by the Right. Both are reactive to middle-class priorities and to the priorities of different parts of the capitalist class, but there is no in-between ground because the Left does not have its own social base of support or its own institutions.
April 11, 2025 at 10:38 PM
heuser.bsky.social
Israel executed 14 paramedics and buried them and their ambulances in a mass grave to cover up the evidence. This is what both of our political parties support unconditionally, and opposition to it gets you snatched off the street by undercover ICE agents.
How Palestinian first responders ended up in a mass grave in Gaza Israel says the emergency workers were fired on for moving "suspiciously." Dispatcher records, witness testimony, and video and audio evidence offer a more disturbing narrative. Yesterday at 12:17 p.m. EDT 12 min 964 Ambulances drive at dawn in a convoy to rescue colleagues, moments before Israeli forces open fire. (Video: PRCS/The Washington Post) By Miriam Berger, Louisa Loveluck, Imogen Piper, Hazem Balousha, Hajar Harb and Abbie Cheeseman The 14 Palestinian emergency workers had been missing for a week when U.N. and civil defense personnel found them late last month in a mass grave of sand. Israeli soldiers had buried them, as well as the wreckage of their ambulances, videos showed. Their resting place, outside the southern Gaza city of Rafah, was marked with one of their red emergency lights. The grim exhumation of the 14 rescue workers buried by Israeli soldiers was captured in a video recorded by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) on March 30. The bodies are partially decomposed and caked in sand. A Palestinian U.N. worker was also among the dead there; the circumstances of his death were unclear. "We're digging them up in their uniforms, with their gloves on," Jonathan Whittall, UNOCHA's main representative in Gaza, says on the video. "They were here to save lives and instead they ended up in a mass grave." Preliminary autopsy notes from forensic doctors in Gaza indicated that the rescue workers had mostly been shot in their upper bodies, including in the head and chest. Mohammed Safi, a civil defense paramedic who participated in the recovery of the bodies, recalled being asked to write names on the shrouds. "I realized they were my colleagues and classmates," he said. The rescue vehicles had been mangled and buried close to the corpses, the video shows. The remains of the civil defense force's team leader, Anwar al-Attar, were found separate from the others, among the vehicles.
April 11, 2025 at 3:45 PM
heuser.bsky.social
My thoughts and actions as I scroll the anodyne safe space of bluesky.
April 5, 2025 at 11:16 AM
heuser.bsky.social
Bipartisanship.
Tweet: "Rafah today—no buildings stand, and no people remain. A city erased." Picture of razed buildings as far as the eye can see.
April 4, 2025 at 3:07 PM
heuser.bsky.social
"Abundance"
March 28, 2025 at 8:04 PM
heuser.bsky.social
Not only can liberalism not combat fascism; it fuels it.
Elon Musk quote tweeting a clip of Ezra Klein talking about "Abundance" agenda: "This shows why a regulatory overhaul is necessary. The burden of mountains of regulations is why the high speed rail can't get down in California and the bridge that the ship hit still hasn't been fixed."
March 28, 2025 at 7:38 PM
heuser.bsky.social
Has anyone written on billionaire psychology? I have a pet theory that psychoanalysis becomes more important for historical analysis as wealth concentrates, making history increasingly rise and fall on the neuroses, insecurities, complexes, perversions of a handful of individuals.
March 26, 2025 at 5:57 PM
heuser.bsky.social
Not sure how to determine whether they saw verse in the tuning dataset, since both Llama and Mistral don't release it. Here's the only info on what they use that I can find. It seems like the instruction-tuning was mainly (only?) performed on conversational datasets, so it seems unlikely, but... 🤷‍♂️?
March 21, 2025 at 11:06 AM
heuser.bsky.social
Finally may have figured out why LLMs rhyme so compulsively: instruction-tuning. Training an LLM to respond "helpfully" to user queries may push models into more "pleasing" aesthetic forms.
Graph showing that simple text completion models more accurately imitate the unrhymed form of C20 verse, whereas instruction-tuned models lapse into rhyme more often. Caption to graph: Given the first 5 lines of 10-20 line poems from poets born in each century, 1600-2000, LLMs are prompted to "complete" the poem. Rhyme is measured by exact phoneme match in the rime of the final syllable (or syllables, if final syllable unstressed). Poems randomly sampled from Chadwyck-Healey poetry collections, with 600 poems for each model for each century. Results shown for actual poems as well as the LLM imitations. Poems "memorized" by the model are excluded.
March 21, 2025 at 9:57 AM
heuser.bsky.social
Bluesky awash in criticism of every action & statement from Trump but I've seen hardly anything on Israel wiping out 400 souls overnight, shattering the ceasefire. I thought liberals might find their spine on Israel now that the genocide is Rep instead of Dem, but no, ppl will still risk nothing.
March 18, 2025 at 2:40 PM
heuser.bsky.social
Only 14 Congresspeople signed a letter calling for the release of Mahmoud Khalil. AOC is not among them. I've been done with her since her "Kamala is working tirelessly for a ceasefire" baldfaced lie.
March 12, 2025 at 10:17 AM
heuser.bsky.social
2 months after the war support for joining Russia in the Donbas was 31% – plus 9% for independence, totalling 40% against the 42% wanting to remain in Ukraine. Not a majority, but certainly not an insignificant number.
archive.is/aVBxG
March 3, 2025 at 2:42 PM