Melanie Walsh

Hi, I’m Melanie Walsh. I am an Assistant Professor in the Information School and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Washington. I am an Executive Council member for the Center for Advances in Libraries, Archives, and Museums, an Affiliate of the Humanities Data Lab, and Co-Director of the Humanities Data Science Summer Institute (HDSSI).

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, where I worked with William J. Maxwell.

My research focuses on how literature and culture are produced, circulated, and transformed in the age of the internet and AI. My work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mozilla Foundation, and Schmidt Sciences.

Full CV: Download

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. You can read an article from the book project and explore some of the data. I also wrote an open-source textbook, Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python.

You can read all of my publications here. Some of my favorite academic essays include: “Tweets of a Native Son” (American Quarterly), “Where is All the Book Data?” (Public Books), “The Goodreads ‘Classics’” (Journal of Cultural Analytics / Post45), and “Sonnet or Not, Bot?” (EMNLP Findings). My favorite creative pieces include: “Bears Will Be Boys” (The Pudding) and “Unattended Packages” (Chicago Reader).

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

• Post45 Data Collective (peer-reviewed, open-access literary and cultural data)
• Responsible Datasets in Context (datasets paired with documentation, data essays, and teaching resources)
• AI for Humanists (resources for humanities scholars to use and critique LLMs)
• What’s Seattle Reading? (exploring contemporary reading trends with Seattle Public Library data)

I also made a Wordle-universe game called Versedle, where you guess who wrote lines of literature:

• Versedle

In my free time, I like to play basketball 🏀, hike ⛰️, and paddle board 🦭. I am not the children’s book author Melanie Walsh, but our interests are converging. You can find me on Bluesky or send me an email at melwalsh at uw dot edu.