About

Ryan Cordell is an associate professor at the School of Information Sciences, with a background in English Language and Literature from the University of Virginia. His scholarship seeks to illuminate how technologies of production, reception, circulation, and remediation shape the meanings of texts within historical communities, and how the complexities of historical texts influence modern scholarly infrastructure. He primarily studies circulation and reprinting in nineteenth-century American newspapers, extending his interests to the influence of digitization and computation on contemporary reading, writing, and research. Cordell collaborates across disciplines, working with colleagues in English, History, and Computer Science on projects such as the Viral Texts project, which uses data mining tools to discover borrowed texts across large-scale archives of nineteenth-century periodicals. He is also a practicing letterpress printer and explores intersections between historical and contemporary information technologies through maker culture. He is a Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School and serves as the Delegate Assembly Representative for the MLA's Forum on Digital Humanities. As director of the Skeuomorph Press and Book Lab, he leads an experiential research and pedagogy studio focused on the history and art of the book.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Linguistics
• Library science
• Mathematics
• Meteorology
• Advertising
• Programming language
• Business
• Database
• Philosophy
• Geography
• Epistemology
• Geology

Selected publications

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

  ArXiv.org · 2025-03-19

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  This study investigates the usage of "slave" and "servant" in the 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.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Data-driven Investigation of Euphemistic Language: Comparing the usage of “slave” and “servant” in 19th century US newspapers

  2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Warning: This paper contains examples of offensive language targeting marginalized populations.This study investigates the usage of "slave" and "servant" in the 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.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Word Embedding Models and the Hybridity of Newspaper Genres

  The American Historical Review · 2024-03-01

  articleSenior author

  Journal Article Word Embedding Models and the Hybridity of Newspaper Genres Get access Avery Blankenship, Avery Blankenship Email: blankenship.a@northeastern.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Ryan Cordell Ryan Cordell Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 1, March 2024, Pages 148–152, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad493 Published: 13 March 2024

  PublisherDOI

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

  Book history · 2024-09-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract: 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.

  PublisherDOI

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

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-02-04

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  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.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Book Size, Book Format: Historical Relationship in the HathiTrust Digital Library Metadata (1500–1799)

  2023-06-01

  article

  Digital libraries create new scholarly possibilities for investigating book format at scale, providing a valuable perspective for book history. This study evaluates the historical relationship between book format and book size using the HathiTrust Digital Library metadata of 133,268 books published between 1500 and 1799. We found that: (1) the size of books generally decreased; (2) smaller book formats gradually replaced larger book formats; and, (3) book size can predict book format relatively accurately. Our findings suggest possible automated improvements to digital library metadata where information about book size is better represented than format, enabling book historians to estimate the prevalence of formats and analyze publication trends.

  PublisherDOI

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

  Library trends · 2023-05-21 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  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.

  PublisherDOI

• The ripple effect of dataset reuse: Contextualising the data lifecycle for machine learning data sets and social impact

  Journal of Information Science · 2023-12-27 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  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.

  PublisherDOI

• Material Cultures of the Digital

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-06-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  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.

  PublisherDOI

• Newspapers and Periodicals

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-06-15

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  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.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David A. Smith

  6 shared

• Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

  3 shared

• Miriam Posner

  University of California, Los Angeles

  3 shared

• Elizabeth Hopwood

  Loyola University Chicago

  3 shared

• Julianne Nyhan

  2 shared

• Kim Gallon

  2 shared

• Jaihyun Park

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  2 shared

• Tanya Clement

  The University of Texas at Austin

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship for Ex…
• Senior Fellow, Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critic…
• Mellon Grant for the Virality of Racial Terror project (2023…