Introducing: Yann Ryan
Yann Ryan recently joined the Institute for History as a postdoctoral researcher within the starting grant project 'Quiet Rebels? A Social History of Political Rhetoric’ under the supervision of Anne Heyer. Below, he introduces himself.
Hello, my name is Yann. The project ‘Quiet Rebels? A Social History of Political Rhetoric’ is looking at the adoption of radical political language by the establishment, and I’m investigating how we can do this using computational techniques such as Large Language Models.
While this position is new, I’ve actually been at Leiden University for a while, and I’m glad to already know some of you. Since 2023, I’ve been working as a lecturer in digital humanities at the Leiden Centre for Digital Humanities (LUCDH).
I’m originally from Limerick, Ireland, where I completed my undergraduate and master’s degrees before moving to London. After working outside academia for a time, I realised I wasn’t finished with research and began a PhD at Queen Mary University of London in 2015.
If I were to sum up my research interests, I’d say I’m fascinated by how information moved and circulated, whether through news, letter networks, or more abstractly, as ideas in printed books and newspapers. This interest began during my master’s thesis, which explored a topic related to the English Civil Wars. I became fascinated by the earliest ‘newsbooks’: the first printed, periodical news in Britain. To begin with I used these as historical sources, but what really intrigued me was how they functioned as contemporary sources of information for their original readers.
My PhD focused on the circulation of news throughout early modern Europe, especially how it crossed borders, languages, and polities. I was particularly interested in the role of early newspapers in sharing information from abroad—how it travelled, changed, and was interpreted when read.
During my PhD I soon realized that digital tools and methods could be used to ask and answer new questions, and I taught myself how to use code to analyse networks and language, which is how I ended up teaching at LUCDH. A secondary interest of mine and something I have been bringing into my teaching is understanding how digitisation affects our use of sources: what is lost, how they are biased, and what opportunities arise when we pair them with computational tools. I previously worked as a curator of newspaper data at the British Library, where I oversaw the release of the library’s first set of open-access digitised newspaper data.
Since completing my PhD at Queen Mary, I’ve held postdoctoral positions in the UK (at Queen Mary), University of Helsinki, KU Leuven in Belgium, and now here at Leiden University. I’m looking forward to spending the next few years on the Quiet Rebels project and hopefully strengthening links between the History Institute and the LUCDH.
At LUCDH (please do come say hi, and join us for our lunchtime lectures!), we teach a minor and electives on topics ranging from digital media to programming, NLP, and digitisation. We also offer equipment and expertise for anyone (staff or students) who’d like to make use of it.