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Short Bio

Melanie Walsh is an Assistant Professor in the Information School and the English Department at the University of Washington. Her research interests include data science, digital humanities, cultural analytics, contemporary literature, and library and information science. She investigates how data and computational methods shape contemporary culture — such as the publishing industry and public libraries — and how they can be used to understand culture in turn. Her current work includes a book project, When Postwar American Fiction Went Viral, and an open-source textbook, Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python. With collaborators, she leads the Post45 Data Collective, Responsible Datasets in Context, AI for Humanists, and What’s Seattle Reading?. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mozilla Foundation, and Schmidt Sciences.

Extended Bio

Melanie Walsh is an Assistant Professor in the Information School and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Washington. She is a member of the Executive Council for the Center for Advances in Libraries, Archives, and Museums (CALMA), an Affiliate of the Humanities Data Lab, and Co-Director of the Humanities Data Science Summer Institute . She is a former Postdoctoral Associate in Information Science at Cornell University and received her PhD in English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis.

Her research interests include data science, digital humanities, cultural analytics, contemporary literature, and library and information science. She investigates how data and computational methods shape contemporary culture — such as the publishing industry and public libraries — and how they can be used to understand culture in turn.

Her current work includes 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 like James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Sandra Cisneros, Chris Kraus, and David Foster Wallace. She also wrote an open-source textbook, Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python, which won Best Digital Humanities Training Material in 2021.

With collaborators, she leads several projects: the Post45 Data Collective, a peer-reviewed, open-access repository for literary and cultural data; Responsible Datasets in Context, which pairs datasets with rich documentation, data essays, and teaching resources; AI for Humanists, which develops resources for humanities scholars to use and critique LLMs; and What’s Seattle Reading?, which explores contemporary reading trends with data from the Seattle Public Library.

Her academic work has been published in American Quarterly, Journal of Cultural Analytics, Post45, Debates in DH, EMNLP, FAccT, and other venues, and her public writing has appeared in the LA Review of Books, Public Books, Publisher’s Weekly, and The Pudding. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mozilla Foundation, and Schmidt Sciences.

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