Undergraduate Courses

  • Artificial Intelligence, Text Reuse, and the Art of Stealing

    Winter 2025 — University of Washington

    This course explores the various ways that texts have been reused throughout literary history, including allusion, quotation, remix, parody, and plagiarism. We examine how the concept of “text reuse” has shown up in writing, art, and research both qualitatively and quantitatively. The motivating framework and methodological approach of the course are both inspired by recent advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP). Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, which can now generate texts in a wide range of styles and genres, have sparked intense public debates about art and intellectual property, authorship and originality, and the way we value human creativity. We aim to contextualize these important cultural questions and conversations by exploring a longer history of text reuse in literature, ranging from modernist poetry to postmodern fiction and ephemeral genres like zines. We will also contextualize the technologies that have mediated these textual expressions, from letterpresses to photocopiers, from word processors to social media and AI.

  • INFO 201: Foundational Skills for Data Science

    Winter 2022, Spring 2022, Winter 2023, Spring 2023 - University of Washington

    This course introduces fundamental tools, technologies, and skills necessary to transform data into knowledge, including the manipulation, analysis, and visualization of data, as well as version control and the programming language R. Students learn to work with real data and reflect on the power and peril of data in the world at large.

  • INFO 350: Information Ethics & Policy

    Autumn 2021, Winter 2022, Autumn 2022, Winter 2023 - University of Washington

    This course examines ethics and policy issues surrounding information technologies, systems, and industries. We emphasize in particular the social, cultural, and political dimensions of these issues. We discuss topics including privacy, intellectual property, online speech, misinformation, algorithmic inequality, and the environmental consequences of information technology. By the end of the course, students are able to critically analyze information issues and develop a project that makes a demonstrable impact beyond the classroom.

  • INFO 498A: Introduction to Cultural Analytics: Data, Computation, & Culture

    • Autumn 2021, Spring 2023 — University of Washington

  • Introduction to Cultural Analytics: Data, Computation, & Culture

    Spring 2020, Spring 2021 - Cornell University

    Course website: https://melaniewalsh.github.io/Intro-Cultural-Analytics/

    This course prepares students to analyze, interpret, and visualize cultural data—such as books, movies, and tweets—with computational methods. After a basic introduction to the programming language Python, we cover topics such as web scraping, text mining, network analysis, and mapping. We survey and discuss how these computational tools are applied in humanistic research. We also reflect on the specific problems, challenges, and ethical dilemmas posed by the computational study of culture. This course was specifically designed for students in the humanities who have no previous programming background.

  • American Fiction in the Social Media Age

    Fall 2017 - Washington University in St. Louis

    Course website: https://afsma17.com/

    This advanced undergraduate course explored how twenty-first-century American writers represent and incorporate forms of new media, mostly focusing on the novel but also considering works that experiment with new media platforms and expand our sense of what literature is and can be. We examined the evolving shape of contemporary American fiction by reading both established writers and new emerging voices — Ruth Ozeki, Jonathan Franzen, Ben Lerner, Chimamanda Adichie — and by considering novels published by major publishing houses as well as self-published novels and Twitter fiction.

  • College Writing 1

    Spring 2016, Fall 2015 - Washington University in St. Louis

    Syllabus: https://melaniewalsh.org/Walsh_Writing1-Syllabus_2016.pdf

Graduate Courses

  • LIS 572: Introduction to Data Science: Applications in LIS and Humanistic Research - University of Washington

    Autumn 2022, Spring 2023, Autumn 2023, Spring 2024, Autumn 2024 — University of Washington

    This graduate-level course offers students with little to no technical background a solid grasp of basic data science methods, techniques, and challenges, as well as an introduction to the programming language R. Students also engage with ethical questions related to data science in research and the world at large. Specific focus is given to applications of data science in academia and library science.

  • Humanities by the Numbers: Essential Readings in the Digital Humanities

    Spring 2018 - Washington University in St. Louis

    Syllabus: https://melaniewalsh.org/Walsh-Erlin_DH-Syllabus_2018.pdf

    This graduate-level seminar introduced doctoral students to current discussions and debates in the digital humanities. Through a weekly hands-on technical lab, we also introduced digital tools for text mining, network analysis, data visualization, and geospatial mapping.