Yann Ryan

Research Fellow, Networking Archives Project

Queen Mary, University of London

Hi there…

I’m a researcher working at the intersection of literary history—specifically early modern news—and data science. This site is a place for my recent publications, some projects and applications I’ve been working on, as well as some blog posts relating to Digital Humanities, R, and other random topics.

I’m currently on the lookout for long and short-term projects. As well as academic historical research and consulting on DH projects, I’m interested in visualisation design, and have experience with R, ggplot, Shiny, Python, and teaching DH courses. Feel free to get in touch if you’re looking for help with any of the above!

This site was built using a bunch of open-source tools: R-studio, Blogdown and Hugo, and is hosted on Github Pages.

Download my resumé.

Interests

Digital Humanities
Network Analysis
History of News

Education

PhD in English Literature, 2020

Queen Mary, University of London
MA in History, 2009

University of Limerick
BA in English and History, 2008

University of Limerick

Experience

Postdoctoral Researcher

University of Helsinki

Feb 2022 – Present London

Working on the project ‘Rise of Commercial Society and Eighteenth-century Publishing’
Applying network analysis and other computational approaches to publisher networks
Primary data is the Early Short Title Catalogue.

Consultant Researcher

Oxford University, History Faculty

Sep 2021 – Feb 2021 London

Consultant research for the Networking Archives project
Contributed to research and data analysis of the Bodleian Card Catalogue, for an article to be published on the Bodleian Library Record

Research Fellow, Networking Archives

Queen Mary, University of London

Mar 2020 – Sep 2021 London

Using big data to write new histories of 17th century diplomacy and intelligencing
Creating interactive visualisations
Extensive data cleaning of a 170,000+ letter archive

Curator of Newspaper Data

British Library

Oct 2018 – Feb 2020 London

Promoted use of the Library newspaper data holdings
Released openly-available newspaper data to public repository
Published a metadata list of all British and Irish newspaper titles held by the library

Associate Teacher

Queen Mary, University of London

Sep 2016 – Oct 2018 London

Associate lecturer

Goldsmiths, University of London

Jan 2016 – May 2016 London

Recent Posts

New Project: Google Sheets Data Annotator, Built with Shiny

I’m currently undertaking a Folger digital fellowship, looking at the media responses and strategies around pandemics in the seventeenth century. Part of the research involves identifying mentions of plague in the abstracts of the English State Papers.

Last updated on Sep 21, 2021 1 min read

Sickness Spreads: Reports of the Plague in the State Papers

My digital fellowship with the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C is looking at responses to information (and disinformation) found in the the English State Papers and digitised sources held by the library.

Last updated on Sep 8, 2021 9 min read

Early modern routing with Viabundus and sfnetworks

The last couple of months have been particularly good ones for anyone working with spatial and historical data: An major new ‘online streetmap’ of early modern Northern Europe, Viabundus, was released at the end of April, about a month after the first CRAN release of an R package called sfnetworks.

Last updated on May 3, 2021 25 min read

Early modern routing with Viabundus and sfnetworks

Exploring the State Papers with Word Embeddings

Text and Models Digital Humanities is often concerned with creating models of text: a general name for a kind of representation of text which makes it in some way easier to interpret.

Last updated on Apr 26, 2021 27 min read

Text Mining the State Papers

Calendars of State Papers and Networking Archives Most of the quantitative research on the Networking Archives project has been using the metadata from the digitised correspondence of State Papers Online.

Last updated on Apr 24, 2021 29 min read

See all posts

Projects

Letter Annotator

Originally custom-built to annotate letters as part of my Folger Fellowship, I realised it might be useful as a lightweight general annotator for data, for example for machine learning labelling. I like using Google sheets for a few reasons, it records every change made in its history, and multiple people can work on the same document. Probably most importantly, it’s a way of recording persistent data without having to learn how to install or use database software, which often requires a paid-for server. You can also manually make changes to the data - the annotator doesn’t care. It has a graphic display telling you how many rows of data are labelled and yet to be labelled.

A Short Guide to Historical Newspaper Data, Using R

An guide (work in progress) to downloading and analysing historical newspaper data, using R

Real or Fake News?

A game built with Shiny, user has to distinguish between genuine State Papers abstracts and those generated by GPT-2, a language model AI.

Ship Itineraries

Browse and visualise ship itineraries measured with a shortest-path algorithm.

State Papers Visual Search

Shiny application built to navigate through the State Papers by time, location and date.

Temporal Clusters Browser

Shiny application buily to visualise temporal clusters in the State Papers network

State Papers Online Reference Creator

A very simple application - paste an English State Papers reference, and receive a correctly formatted reference.

UK Coronavirus Test Providers Dashboard

This page takes the list of providers for 2 and 8 day corona tests as found here and converts it into a simple dashboard. Use the sliders and selecter to filter the table to a preferred range of providers. Made using R, particularly rvest and crosstalk. Brief code tutorial available soon!