About

Thorsten Ries is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. His academic expertise encompasses Digital Humanities and Digital Learning, with a particular focus on German Literature from the 18th to the 21st Century. His research interests include the Theory, Methodology, and Practice of Scholarly Editing, Genetic Criticism, and Textual Criticism. Additionally, he engages with Digital Literature, Digital History, Literary Theory, and the Methodology and Discipline of the History of Germanistik. His work integrates traditional literary analysis with digital approaches, contributing to the understanding and dissemination of German literary and cultural history.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Humanities
• Art
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Data science
• Medicine
• Statistics
• Medical physics
• Mathematics
• World Wide Web

Selected publications

• From codework poetics to the AI writing scene

  International Journal of Digital Humanities · 2025-08-26

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Reproducibility and explainability in digital humanities

  International Journal of Digital Humanities · 2024-01-03 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reproducibility and explainability in digital humanities

  International Journal of Digital Humanities · 2023 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Computer Science
  • Humanities
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Mrs. Dalloway Said She Would Segment the Chapters Herself

  2023-01-01

  articleOpen access

  This paper proposes a sentiment-centric pipeline to perform unsupervised plot extraction on non-linear novels like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a novel widely considered to be “plotless. Combining transformer-based sentiment analysis models with statistical testing, we model sentiment’s rate-of-change and correspondingly segment the novel into emotionally self-contained units qualitatively evaluated to be meaningful surrogate pseudo-chapters. We validate our findings by evaluating our pipeline as a fully unsupervised text segmentation model, achieving a F-1 score of 0.643 (regional) and 0.214 (exact) in chapter break prediction on a validation set of linear novels with existing chapter structures. In addition, we observe notable differences between the distributions of predicted chapter lengths in linear and non-linear fictional narratives, with the latter exhibiting significantly greater variability. Our results hold significance for narrative researchers appraising methods for extracting plots from non-linear novels.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Digital Archives, Digital Cultures: An Opportunity for German Studies

  German Studies Review · 2023-02-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Digital Archives, Digital Cultures:An Opportunity for German Studies Thorsten Ries (bio) "die geräte klüger als ihre besitzer / rechnen sich bis zu programnmen und knälen vor." This text fragment was located between other born-digital drafts in a digital [End Page 136] document file, which the author preserved in his personal born-digital archive. In this draft of the poem ausfahrt st nazaire, which was partially inspired by 9/11, Speier also experimented with concepts of concrete poetry and this draft's digital materiality: he integrated automatically generated HTML and CSS code into his poetic draft and rewrote the code into verse. "the devices smarter than their owners / <DIV><STRONG>wer berechnet seine Stille</STRONG></DIV>"—Speier's tentative code scriptum continues the long negotiation and renegotiation of poetic agency between the writer and their tool, writing scene, and its context that scholars have followed through Klopstock's Arbeitstagebuch,1 Hölderlin's manuscripts, Nietzsche's typescripts ("unser schreibzeug arbeitet mit an unseren gedanken"),2 and which is continued in the unease some authors feel about the limitations of their graphical writing interfaces,3 as well as in the form of digital literature, digitally generated literature ("Schreibenlassen"), and code poetry.4 Research on personal born-digital archives, preserved according to forensic standards, could be described as a continuation of the philological program, analytic bibliography, scholarly editing, and the critique génétique with digital forensic means in the digital age: the recovery of born-digital drafts, draft fragments, corrupted data, and other traces of the writing process from hard drives, storage media, and even the cloud, serves the purpose of the philological reconstruction of the literary writing process. Although media-specific analysis of historical digital materiality is highly specific, the reconstruction of traces of the writing process from Michael Speier's, Thomas Kling's,5 and other authors' hard drives6 at the same time sheds light on the authors' hybrid writing practices between analogue and digital, as well as on a new type of material digital record: paragenetic traces of the word processor.7 Depending on the specific historical design of the system's ensemble of hardware, operating system, and application, crashes of the word processor system can actually lead to retention and preservation of draft text material. Literary production has changed its shape in the digital age, and recent studies on the hybrid materiality of some of the earliest born-digital literary and cultural code works, such as Lutz's Stochastische Texte, and Weizenbaum's ELIZA,8 demonstrate that literary archives are collecting and preserving born-digitals as well as digital literature beyond hypertext. Without stepping into complications associated with the term "media archaeology," one could draw a line from Friedrich Kittler's reading of hard- and software architectures as a technological document of historical dispositives and cultural technological history9 to Jean-Francois Blanchette's multilayered design histories of hard- and software architectures10 and to Matthew Kirschenbaum's "forensic materiality" of digital media.11 The digital forensic perspective on born-digital has not only an archival and literary dimension for German studies and its integration with Digital Humanities research methods and methodology. Under a digital culture perspective, the German USENET [End Page 137] and early web history still require scholarly investigation as cultural spaces and its preservation is materially precarious. First attempts have been made to tackle conceptual and practical issues of the preservation of German "diskmag" culture.12 But if we consider taking digital German culture studies seriously as part of German studies, we might have to include the Chaos Computer Club's Hackerbibel, the texts and code by the German feminist hackers around Rena Tangens (codename Haecksen), and nerd pop culture products like the German Perry Rhodan sci-fi series in our canon, next to Elfriede Jelinek's Ich Ding der Unmöglichkeit and Sibylle Berg's Nerds retten die Welt. A digital forensic perspective would also be applied, under a broader digital history and digital cultures perspective, in research projects on German polarized political discourse and misinformation in online and social media networks. Thorsten Ries thorsten ries (thorsten.ries@austin.utexas.edu) an assistant professor at the Department of Germanic...

  PublisherDOI

• Pour la reconstruction des processus d’écriture numériques de Derrida grâce à la computer forensics : reconstruction des données et matérialité numérique historique

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2022-06-09

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Comme vient de le montrer la contribution précédente et comme l’avaient déjà signalé Aurèle Crasson, Jean-Louis Lebrave et Jérémy Pedrazzi dans leur étude « Le “siliscrit” de Jacques Derrida. Exploration d’une archive nativement numérique », l’Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) à Caen a réalisé des images forensiques complètes et pérennes des disques durs de Jacques Derrida, ainsi que des supports de stockage amovibles recelant des traces de la production textuelle du philosophe, qui peuvent être analysées et restaurées avec des moyens d’analyse numérique forensique. Cet article n’entend pas seulement contribuer aux recherches philologiques sur Derrida, mais également à la codicologie historique et forensique de l’informatique, en présentant les résultats, les méthodes et les aspects forensiques approfondis de la matérialité historique numérique de ces supports de stockage.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Digitale Literatur als Gegenstand der Literaturwissenschaft. Ein multimodales Forschungsprogramm

  2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Art
  • Humanities

  Literatur ist so digital wie die Gesellschaft, in der sie stattfindet. Heute sind Rezeption und Literaturproduktion weitestgehend von digitaler Technik bestimmt.

  PublisherDOI

• Textgenese und digitale Forensik : exemplarische Studien zu Thomas Kling und Michael Speier

  Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) · 2021-01-01 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Digitale Medien haben den literarischen Schreibprozess und die Materialität textgenetischer Zeugen grundsätzlich verändert. Thorsten Ries demonstriert in Modellstudien zu hybriden ‚dossiers génétiques‘ Thomas Klings und Michael Speiers die Rekonstruktion von hybriden Schreibprozessen, welche sowohl auf Papier als auch am Computer stattfanden. Die philologische Rekonstruktion der "born digital"-Anteile der ‚dossiers génétiques‘ wird durch digitalforensische Methoden ermöglicht. Die Analyse und Diskussion der hybriden Schreibprozesse am Beispiel von Klings ‚Rhapsoden am Sepik‘ und Speiers ‚September St. Nazaire‘ präsentieren bislang unbekanntes Quellenmaterial und behandeln neben digitalforensischen Methoden und Fragen der historischen digitalen Materialität auch editionswissenschaftliche Aspekte der analytischen Synthese digitaler und analoger Befunde.

  Publisher

• State of the Field: Digital History

  History · 2020 · 58 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Data science

  Abstract Computing and the use of digital sources and resources is an everyday and essential practice in current academic scholarship. The present article gives a concise overview of approaches and methods within digital historical scholarship, focusing on the question ‘How have the digital humanities evolved and what has that evolution brought to historical scholarship?’ We begin by discussing techniques in which data are generated and machine searchable, such as OCR/HTR, born‐digital archives, computer vision, scholarly editions and linked data. In the second section, we provide examples of how data is made more accessible through quantitative text and network analysis. The third section considers the need for hermeneutics and data‐awareness in digital historical scholarship. The technologies described in this article have had varying degrees of effect on historical scholarship, usually in indirect ways. With this article we aim to take stock of the digital approaches and methods used in historical scholarship in order to provide starting points for scholars seeking to understand the digital turn in the field and how and when to implement such approaches in their work.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• „Die weißen Segel“: „der grosse irdische Traum“. Textgenetische Notizen zu einem in der Ausgabe des Briefwechsels Benn-Oelze veröffentlichten Entwurf

  2019-12-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Der Beitrag rekonstruiert den textgenetischen Befund und Kontext einer Textstufe von Benns Stadthallen-Gedicht „Die weißen Segel“ (1935), welche in der Ausgabe der Briefe Oelzes und Benns erstmals veröffentlicht wurde. Die detaillierte Auswertung des editorischen Textbefunds, textgenetische Analyse und entstehungsgeschichtliche Einordnung des auf der Rückseite einer Postkarte überlieferten Entwurfes geben nicht nur einen Einblick in eine bislang nicht zugängliche Phase der Entstehung der ersten vier Strophen des Gedichts und Hinweise auf weitere mögliche Bezüge zum Oelze-Briefwechsel. Sie zeigen auch bislang unbekannte Facetten und sich im Schreibprozess des Gedichts vollziehende konzeptionelle Wechsel in Benns frühen, noch politisch ambivalenten Ansätzen zu einer Abgrenzung vom Nationalsozialismus auf. Im Vergleich zur folgenden Textstufe lässt sich dem Entwurf die Tendenz zur Selbstzensur in der frühen Phase der „aristokratischen Form der Emigrierung“ ablesen.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jens Fiehler

  Universität Hamburg

  45 shared

• Gerhard Adam

  Universität Hamburg

  24 shared

• Nils D. Forkert

  Ontario Brain Institute

  18 shared

• H. Zeumer

  16 shared

• Jan Regelsberger

  14 shared

• F Reitmeier

  Universität Hamburg

  13 shared

• M Cramer

  Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

  13 shared

• M Jaehne

  13 shared

Education

• PhD (Joint PhD): Dr. Phil. / Doktor in de Letterkunde, German Literature

  Hamburg University / Ghent University

  2013

• Magister Artium, German Literature and Linguistics

  Hamburg University

  2003