publications

2025

2025

1. A Data-driven Investigation of Euphemistic Language: Comparing the usage of "slave" and "servant" in 19th century US newspapers

   Jaihyun Park and Ryan Cordell

   Mar 2025

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   This study investigates the usage of "slave" and "servant" in 19th century US newspapers using computational methods. While both terms were used to refer to enslaved African Americans, they were used in distinct ways. In the Chronicling America corpus, we included possible OCR errors by using FastText embedding and excluded text reprints to consider text reprint culture in the 19th century. Word2vec embedding was used to find semantically close words to "slave" and "servant" and log-odds ratio was calculated to identify over-represented discourse words in the Southern and Northern newspapers. We found that "slave" is associated with socio-economic, legal, and administrative words, however, "servant" is linked to religious words in the Northern newspapers while Southern newspapers associated "servant" with domestic and familial words. We further found that slave discourse words in Southern newspapers are more prevalent in Northern newspapers while servant discourse words from each side are prevalent in their own region. This study contributes to the understanding of how newspapers created different discourses around enslaved African Americans in the 19th century US.

2024

2024

1. EAL

   Review of Publishing Plates: Stereotyping and Electrotyping in Nineteenth-Century US Print Culture by Jeffrey M. Makala

   Ryan Cordell

   Early American Literature, 2024
2. BH

   Imagined Readers: Contrasting Professional and Reader Reviews of Chinese Book Design

   Sun Zhang and Ryan Cordell

   Book History, 2024

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   The “Beauty of Books in China” is an annual book design competition that represents the highest standard of book design in China. Despite being regarded as successful within the professional sphere, the award-winning books receive varying evaluations from general readers. In the online community “Douban Reading” which boasts a large gathering of Chinese readers, individuals express their opinions through book reviews, often diverging from the intentions of judges and designers. This article centralizes the concept of the “imagined reader” to delineate the aesthetic divergence between professional and general readers in evaluating the material features of award-winning Chinese books. Using the TF-IDF algorithm, this article conducts text analysis on the original judge comments and reader comments, identifies characteristic terms within each group, and shows different reading preference. This research finds that there are gaps between imagined readers and real readers in terms of aesthetic foundation, attitudes towards supplementary design elements, practical skills, and reading contexts. Readers’ comments reflect a distinct contrast to the design-centric view of judges.

3. AHR

   Word Embedding Models and the Hybridity of Newspaper Genres

   Avery Blankenship and Ryan Cordell

   The American Historical Review, Mar 2024

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4. A Quantitative Discourse Analysis of Asian Workers in the US Historical Newspapers

   Jaihyun Park and Ryan Cordell

   Feb 2024

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   Warning: This paper contains examples of offensive language targetting marginalized population. The digitization of historical texts invites researchers to explore the large-scale corpus of historical texts with computational methods. In this study, we present computational text analysis on a relatively understudied topic of how Asian workers are represented in historical newspapers in the United States. We found that the word "coolie" was semantically different in some States (e.g., Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Arkansas) with the different discourses around coolie. We also found that then-Confederate newspapers and then-Union newspapers formed distinctive discourses by measuring over-represented words. Newspapers from then-Confederate States associated coolie with slavery-related words. In addition, we found Asians were perceived to be inferior to European immigrants and subjected to the target of racism. This study contributes to supplementing the qualitative analysis of racism in the United States with quantitative discourse analysis.

2023

2023

1. THB

   Programmable Type: The Craft of Printing, the Craft of Code

   Ryan Cordell

   In Teaching the History of the Book, May 2023

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2. JIS

   The Ripple Effect of Dataset Reuse: Contextualising the Data Lifecycle for Machine Learning Data Sets and Social Impact

   Jaihyun Park and Ryan Cordell

   Journal of Information Science, Dec 2023

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   Although there exists a rich literature on data lifecycle, a common framework for data lifecycle depicts reuse as the last stage. However, this framework fails to explain the complex lifecycle of machine learning (ML) data sets, which can have many different afterlives. Data sets for ML can be expanded to supplement previous research, and researchers can concatenate multiple data sets to develop new models. This study discusses ML dataset reuse through the lens of the data–information–knowledge–wisdom pyramid. In social science research, researchers might reuse data to analyse a new research question that is still in the context of the data domain. By contrast, research practices in ML, where researchers layer multiple data sets for training purposes, require us to ask whether the existing data lifecycle model, ending with ‘reuse’, is appropriate for explaining such an iterative and layered lifecycle. This study introduces one case of merging computer vision data set and natural language processing data set and two cases of applying ML models from outside of the ML community (hate speech detection and politeness detection) to justify a framework for a ML dataset lifecycle. Last but not least, this study proposes a ML dataset lifecycle and provides case examples to describe each stage.

2022

2022

1. Material Cultures of the Digital

   Ryan Cordell

   In The Cambridge Handbook of Material Culture Studies, 2022

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   With the rise of digital technologies the number and diversity of related tools (such as phones, computers, 3-D printers, etc.) have markedly increased. This chapter examines how digital objects and other new technologies alter human experiences with the material world.

2. LT

   Closing the Loop: Bridging Machine Learning (ML) Research and Library Systems

   Ryan Cordell

   Library Trends, 2022

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   This article argues that if libraries are to take leadership in conversations about the ethics and application of machine learning (ML) to cultural materials, they must move beyond the "perpetual future tense" of most library ML proposals and experiments, narrowing the gap separating promises that ML will enhance discoverability for library materials and the library systems through which most users encounter those materials. Even as ML methods have grown more powerful, nuanced, and sophisticated, ambitious hopes that ML might help better identify and describe vast library collections have been largely unmet, at least from the perspective of library patrons, researchers, and students. To address this gap, the article argues that libraries and ML researchers should work together to develop iterative, experimental, and even speculative interfaces that allow users to explore collections through ML-derived patterns that can enhance library data while educating users about ML processes, decisions, and biases.

3. Newspapers and Periodicals

   Ryan Cordell

   In American Literature in Transition, 1851–1877, 2022

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   In a review of Graham’s Magazine published in the March 1, 1845 issue of The Broadway Journal, Edgar Allan Poe predicted of magazine literature, “[i]n a few years its importance will be found to have increased in geometrical ratio” because “[t]he whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward.” Busy mid-century readers, speeding along in “the rush of the age,” required a medium that kept pace. “We now demand the light artillery of the intellect,” Poe insisted: “we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused – in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible.”1 It can be difficult to pin down how seriously Poe took such declarations. Praise and ironic critique intertwine in his critical writings, as in subsequent paragraphs of this review, where he describes the engraving “Dacota Woman and the Assiniboin Girl” as “worthy of all commendation,” while another engraving in the same issue, “The Love Letter,” “has the air of having been carved by a very small child, with a dull knife, from a raw potato.”2 If Poe marks a genuine trend toward periodical forms of literature in the period, he also stages an ambiguous response to the trend, vacillating between praise and condemnation.

4. Material Cultures of the Digital

   Ryan Cordell

   In The Cambridge Handbook of Material Culture Studies, 2022

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   With the rise of digital technologies the number and diversity of related tools (such as phones, computers, 3-D printers, etc.) have markedly increased. This chapter examines how digital objects and other new technologies alter human experiences with the material world.

5. Going the Rounds: Virality in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers

   Ryan C. Cordell, David A. Smith, Abby Mullen, and 2 more authors

   2022

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   Going the Rounds brings together literary, historical, and computational criticism to illuminate the extent, content, and character of information exchange in nineteenth-century US periodicals. Drawing on reprinted texts from the NEH-, Mellon-, and ACLS-funded Viral Texts Project at Northeastern University, Going the Rounds situates widely reprinted newspaper genres such as lists, scientific reports, recipes, travel accounts, and vignettes at the center of the period’s print culture. Drawing on methods such as text mining, geospatial analysis, and network analysis, the book offers a new, systemic account of information exchange in the nineteenth-century’s primary mass medium.

2020

2020

1. Speculative Bibliography

   Ryan Cordell

   Anglia, Sep 2020

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   Abstract

   This article proposes speculative bibliography as an experimental approach to the digitised archive, in which textual associations are constituted propositionally, iteratively, and (sometimes) temporarily, as the result of probabilistic computational models. Speculative bibliography is offered as a complement to digital scholarly editing, and as a direct response to the challenges of scale and labour that will make comprehensive editing of digital archives impossible. Rather than acting on specific, individual texts, a speculative bibliography enacts a scholarly theory of the text through a computational model, reorganising the archive to evidence a particular idea of textual relation or interaction. Such models, in which textual relationships are determined by formal, internal textual structures, constitute bibliographic arguments that can be verified, amended, extended, or contested on either humanistic or computational grounds.

2. LoC

   Machine Learning + Libraries

   Ryan Cordell

   Jul 2020

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   The report expertly frames machine learning and both its possibilities and its challenges. After defining machine learning and distinguishing it from the broader category of artificial intelligence (AI), Dr. Cordell describes the history of the use of these technologies in libraries and explores various approaches. Urging care and thoughtful implementation of machine learning, the report points out the risks and potential benefits for crowdsourcing, searchability of type and handwritten documents and audiovisual materials, collection management, conservation and preservation, and creative and artistic works. The report concludes with recommendations for responsibly implementing machine learning, improving access to data, developing infrastructure, and cultivating expertise.

2019

2019

1. Teaching Humanistic Data Analysis

   Ryan C. Cordell

   In Digital Scholarship, Digital Classrooms, 2019

2018

2018

1. Kaleidoscopic Pedagogy: The Idea of a C19 Classroom Laboratory

   Ryan C. Cordell, Benjamin Doyle, and Elizabeth Hopwood

   In Teaching with Digital Humanities: Tools and Methods for Nineteenth Century American Literature, Nov 2018
2. A Research Agenda for Historical and Multilingual Optical Character Recognition

   David A Smith and Ryan Cordell

   2018

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2017

2017

1. BH

   "Q i-Jtb the Raven": Taking Dirty OCR Seriously

   Ryan Cordell

   Book History, 2017

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   Abstract:This article argues that scholars must understand mass digitized texts as assemblages of new editions, subsidiary editions, and impressions of their historical sources, and that these various parts require sustained bibliographic analysis and description. To adequately theorize any research conducted in large-scale text archives—including research that includes primary or secondary sources discovered through keyword search—we must avoid the myth of surrogacy proffered by page images and instead consider directly the text files they overlay. Focusing on the OCR (optical character recognition) from which most large-scale historical text data derives, this article argues that the results of this "automatic" process are in fact new editions of their source texts that offer unique insights into both the historical texts they remediate and the more recent era of their remediation. The constitution and provenance of digitized archives are, to some extent at least, knowable and describable. Just as details of type, ink, or paper, or paratext such as printer’s records can help us establish the histories under which a printed book was created, details of format, interface, and even grant proposals can help us establish the histories of corpora created under conditions of mass digitization.

2. AmP

   "Fugitive Verses": The Circulation of Poems in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers

   Ryan Cordell and Abby Mullen

   American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism, Mar 2017

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   This article proposes a nineteenth-century term, “fugitive verses,” as a conceptual framework for grappling with the textual and authorial fluidity of newspaper poetry, a genre that simultaneously reflected the stability of literary conventions and refracted those conventions through the exchange, selection, and seriality that defined newspaper networks. The term “fugitive” shifted from referring to poems published to mark one specific occasion in time to those that demonstrate the serial, circulatory, and recursive temporality of newspaper publication and readership. Fugitive poems are fluid, adaptable for new contexts and audiences. They blend the literary with the informational, as the poems’ texts and authorship narratives interweave to appeal to readers. Like other species of newspaper texts, fugitive verses were preserved through circulation, and through dynamic interplays among the networks of writers, editors, and readers who composed, recomposed, excerpted, and remediated them in both newspapers and closely related media, such as scrapbooks.

2016

2016

1. AmP

   What Has the Digital Meant to American Periodicals Scholarship?

   Ryan Cordell

   American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism, 2016

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2. A Larger View of Digital American Studies

   Ryan Cordell

   Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2016
3. Special Collections for All: Open, Digital Archives to Public Writing in the Literature Classroom

   Ryan C. Cordell

   In Teaching Literature with Digital Technology: Assignments, Jul 2016
4. DDH

   How Not to Teach Digital Humanities

   Ryan C. Cordell

   In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, 2016

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   Start reading this text on Debates in the DH Manifold.

2015

2015

1. ALH

   Reprinting, Circulation, and the Network Author in Antebellum Newspapers

   Ryan Cordell

   American Literary History, Aug 2015

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2. Viral Textuality in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Newspaper Exchanges

   Ryan C. Cordell

   In Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies, May 2015
3. ALH

   Computational Methods for Uncovering Reprinted Texts in Antebellum Newspapers

   David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Abby Mullen

   American Literary History, 2015

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2014

2014

1. IEEE

   Detecting and Modeling Local Text Reuse

   David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, and 2 more authors

   In IEEE/ACM Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Sep 2014

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   Texts propagate through many social networks and provide evidence for their structure. We describe and evaluate efficient algorithms for detecting clusters of reused passages embedded within longer documents in large collections. We apply these techniques to two case studies: analyzing the culture of free reprinting in the nineteenth-century United States and the development of bills into legislation in the U.S. Congress. Using these divergent case studies, we evaluate both the efficiency of the approximate local text reuse detection methods and the accuracy of the results. These techniques allow us to explore how ideas spread, which ideas spread, and which subgroups shared ideas.

2. ACL

   Detecting and Evaluating Local Text Reuse in Social Networks

   Shaobin Xu, David Smith, Abigail Mullen, and 1 more author

   In Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Social Dynamics and Personal Attributes in Social Media, Jun 2014

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2013

2013

1. DHQ

   "Taken Possession of": The Reprinting and Reauthorship of Hawthorne’s "Celestial Railroad" in the Antebellum Religious Press

   Ryan Cordell

   2013

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2. "This Flattering Millennium Theory": Denominationalism against Millennialism in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater

   Ryan Cordell

   In Apocalypse and the Millennium in the American Civil War Era, 2013
3. IEEE

   Infectious Texts: Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers

   David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

   In 2013 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Oct 2013

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   Texts propagate through many social networks and provide evidence for their structure. We present efficient algorithms for detecting clusters of reused passages embedded within longer documents in large collections. We apply these techniques to analyzing the culture of reprinting in the United States before the Civil War. Without substantial copyright enforcement, stories, poems, news, and anecdotes circulated freely among newspapers, magazines, and books. From a collection of OCR’d newspapers, we extract a new corpus of reprinted texts, explore the geographic spread and network connections of different publications, and analyze the time dynamics of different genres.

2008

2008

1. SAF

   "Enslaving You, Body and Soul": The Uses of Temperance in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and "Anti-Tom" Fiction

   Ryan C. Cordell

   Studies in American Fiction, 2008