Melanie Walsh

Assistant Professor | Information School | University of Washington | Seattle, USA 🌦️😎

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Hi, I’m Melanie Walsh. I’m an Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. Before UW, I was a Postdoctoral Associate in Information Science at Cornell University, where I worked with David Mimno. I received my PhD in English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis.

My research interests include data science, digital humanities, cultural analytics, literature, and libraries—preferably all of the above combined. You can download my full CV here.

I am currently at work on a book project, When Postwar American Fiction Went Viral: Protest, Profit, and Popular Readers in the 21st Century, which follows the social media afterlives of American authors.

I also designed and released a free, open-source textbook, Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python, which introduces the programming language Python to people interested in the humanities and social science.

With wonderful collaborators, I also lead several projects that I’m proud of:

In my free time, I like to play basketball 🏀, hike ⛰️, and paddle board among seal friends 🦭 (like in Shilshole Bay pictured above!).

I am recruiting one student to join my group in 2025-2026. For more info, see “Mentorship”.

news

Oct 22, 2024 This week I am attending the Mozilla Responsible Computing Challenge (RCC) Global Conclave in Kerala, India on behalf of the Responsible Datasets in Context project.
Sep 15, 2024 Grant news! The Post45 Data Collective received a Level II NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant. This award will help us make book data more useable and interoperable.
Oct 30, 2023 Grant news! Very excited to share that we received a Mozilla Responsible Computing Challenge Award. This award is supporting Responsible Datasets in Context—a repository of datasets that are paired with rich documentation, data essays, and teaching resources. Read the press release.
Sep 01, 2023 Job news! I started a new position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington.
Jan 15, 2023 Grant news! We were awarded a Level III NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for our AI for Humanists Project. Read the press release.

selected publications

  1. Does ChatGPT Have a Poetic Style?
    Melanie Walsh, Anna Preus, and Elizabeth Gronski
    In Computational Humanities Research (CHR), Dec 2024
    arXiv:2410.15299
  2. Sonnet or Not, Bot? Poetry Evaluation for Large Models and Datasets
    Melanie Walsh, Maria Antoniak, and Anna Preus
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP, Nov 2024
  3. The Challenges and Possibilities of Social Media Data: New Directions in Literary Studies and the Digital Humanities
    Melanie Walsh
    Nov 2023
    publisher: U of Minnesota Press
  4. Where is all the book data?
    Melanie Walsh
    Public Books, Nov 2022
    🎙️I spoke about this essay with Australian radio ABC.🎙️
  5. The Goodreads “Classics”: A Computational Study of Readers, Amazon, and Crowdsourced Amateur Criticism
    Melanie Walsh, and Maria Antoniak
    Post45 and Journal of Cultural Analytics, Nov 2021