Discussion with Melanie Walsh

Speaker

Melanie Walsh

Melanie Walsh is an assistant professor in the Information School 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. Previously, she was a postdoctoral associate in information science at Cornell University. She received her Ph.D. in English literature from Washington University in St. Louis, where she specialized in computational approaches to text and social media data and served as a fellow in the Humanities Digital Workshop.

Walsh is currently working on a book called When Postwar American Fiction Went Viral: Protest, Profit, and Popular Readers in the 21st Century, which traces how postwar literary texts were recirculated and reimagined by various internet communities and political movements, such as Black Lives Matter. She is also co-PI of the NEH-funded AI for Humanists project (formerly the BERT for Humanists project), and she is co-editor of the Post45 Data Collective, a peer-reviewed, open-access repository for literary and cultural data from 1945 to the present. Lastly, she is the author of the widely used online textbook, Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python, which was voted the “Best Digital Humanities Training Material” of 2021.