Ryan explains how computers can help us overcome the human constraints on reading time. The distance of distant reading brings out the scale of history. We chat about the computational study of culture and literary history, and what computers have got to do with creativity. Ryan gives plenty of exciting examples from his research. He talks about telling the history of words like ‘culture’, capturing a geography of emotions of London, and the question of what Jane Austen really tells us about what Mr Darcy looks like. We also hear about Prosodic, a tool Ryan developed for metrical-phonological annotation (give it a try on one of Shakespeare’s sonnets – or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!).

Dr Ryan Heuser is a research fellow at King’s College at the University of Cambridge.