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Specializations

  • Digital Humanities
  • Cultural Analytics
  • Literature

Research Areas

Biography

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 PhD 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.

Education

  • Ph D, English & American Literature, Washington University in St. Louis, 2019
  • MA, English, Washington University in St. Louis, 2015
  • BA, English, Washington University in St. Louis, 2013

Awards

  • Cross-disciplinary Research Cluster Award - Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington, 2023
  • Data Science Minor Course Development Award - University of Washington, 2023
  • Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship - Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington, 2023
  • Humanities Data Science Summer Institute Fellowship - University of Washington, 2023
  • NEH Digital Humanities Level III Advancement Grant - National Endowment for the Humanities, 2023
  • Best Digital Humanities Training Material - The Digital Humanities Awards, 2021
  • NEH Digital Humanities Level I Advancement Grant - National Endowment for the Humanities, 2021
  • Emerging Open Scholarship Award, Honorable Mention - Canadian Social Knowledge Institute, 2020
  • Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence - Arts & Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis, 2019
  • Dissertation Fellowship - Center for the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis, 2018
  • Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship - The Lilly Library, Indiana University, 2018
  • William J. Hill Visiting Researcher Travel Grant - Wittliff Collections, Texas State University, 2018
  • Humanities Digital Workshop Summer Fellowship - Washington University in St. Louis, 2015-2017
  • Harriet Schwenk Kluver Prize - English Department, Washington University in St. Louis, 2010
  • Responsible Computing Challenge Award - Mozilla Foundation, 2023

Publications and Contributions

Presentations

  • AI & Humanities Event (2025)
    Lehigh University - Bethlehem, PA
  • Beyond the Hype: Charting a Path for AI in Humanities Research (2025)
    Hong Kong Association for Digital Humanities 2025 International Conference on AI & the Digital Humanities - Hong Kong
  • Data Advocacy for All (2025)
    University of Colorado Denver - Denver, CO
  • Data Science/Computational Social Science Seminar (2025)
    Information School, Univeristy of Michigan - Ann Arbor, MI
  • Data Speculations: A National Forum on Library Digital Stewardship for Copyrighted Contemporary Culture (2025)
    IMLS-Sponsored National Forum - Virtual
  • Responsible Datasets in Context (2025)
    Working with Data for Social Change Symposium - CU Boulder
  • The Ends of Prosody (2025)
    Princeton University - Princeton, New Jersey
  • What do LLMs Know About Poetry? (2025)
    Data Science/Computational Social Science Seminar - Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
  • AI + DEI? Investigating Automated Diversity Audits in Public Libraries (2024)
    UCLA Critical Data Lab (DataX) - Virtual
  • AI for Humanists (2024)
    Final Conference, Digital Humanities and Artificial Intelligence CNRS AISSAI (AI for Science, Science for AI) - Paris, France
  • Cultural Analytics: Understanding Culture Through Data While Protecting Culture From Data (2024)
    “Intensive Capstone on ‘Digital Remembrance Practices” at the University of Washington, led by Temi Odumosu - Seattle, WA
  • Data Visualization & Tweets of a Native Son (2024)
    “Intro to Digital Studies in Arts and Humanities” at Michigan State University, led by Kristen Mapes - East Lansing, MI
  • Future Direction in Text Analysis and Social Media Data (2024)
    Text Analysis Module Series Brown University - Providence, Rhode Island
  • Not With a Bang But a Tweet (2024)
    The Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society, Department of English at Notre Dame (virtual) - Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Reinventions and responsibilities in the Age of AI (2024)
    Digital Humanities (DH) 2024 Conference - Arlington, VA
  • Responsible Computing Challenge (RCC) Global Conclave (2024)
    Mozilla Foundation - Kerala, India
  • Responsible Datasets in Context: Teaching with Data and Emphasizing the Value of Historical Context (2024)
    ADHO Digital Humanities (DH) Conference 2024 - Washington, D.C.
  • Responsible Datasets in Context: Teaching with Data and Emphasizing the Value of Historical Context (2024)
    Digital Humanities (DH) 2024 Conference - Arlington, VA
  • Schmidt Workshop on Humanities and AI (2024)
    Schmidt Sciences - Oxford, England
  • Teaching Machine Learning in the Digital Humanities (2024)
    ADHO Digital Humanities (DH) Conference 2024 - Washington, D.C.
  • The Meme of the Author (2024)
    International Reader Studies Symposium, Price Lab for Digital Humanities, University of Pennsylvania - Philadelphia, PA
  • The Meme of the Author (2024)
    International Symposium on Reader Studies in the Digital Age, Price Lab for Digital Humanities, University of Pennsylvania - Philadelphia, PA
  • What ChatGPT Poetry Can Teach Us About AI and Language (2024)
    Disruptive Innovation: A.I., Language, Arts, and Education, Alliance Française - Seattle, WA
  • What do LLMs ‘know’ about poetry? (2024)
    Thematic Semester Digital Humanities and Artificial Intelligence Final Conference - Paris, France
  • What Do LLMs ‘Know’ About Poetry? (2024)
    Final Conference, Digital Humanities and Artificial Intelligence CNRS AISSAI (AI for Science, Science for AI) - Paris, France
  • What Does ChatGPT Know About Poetic Form? (2024)
    Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention 2024 - Philadelphia, PA
  • When Machine Learning Meets Cultural Heritage Collections (2024)
    CALMA (Center for Advances in Libraries, Museums, and Archives) - Seattle, WA
  • Artificial Intelligence: An Overview for the NEH (2023)
    National Endowment for the Humanities - Virtual
  • Collections as Data: State of the Field and Future Directions (2023)
    Collections as Data: Part to Whole, Mellon-funded initiative - Vancouver, Canada
  • Data and Culture: Understanding Culture Through Data While Protecting Culture From Data (2023)
    Colloquium at the Information School at the University of Texas - Austin, Texas
  • David Foster Wallace Bros on Reddit (2023)
    Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) - Seattle, Washington
  • Large Language Models for FAccT Researchers (2023)
    FAccT - Chicago, Illinois
  • Large Language Models for Humanists: A Hands-On Introduction (2023)
    AI, Creativity, & Humanities Research Cluster Simpson Center - Seattle, Washington
  • Not with a Bang But a Tweet (2023)
    The Social Lives of Digitized Culture Research Cluster, Information School at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign - Champaign, Illinois
  • Poetic Authorship in the Digital Age: Rupi Kaur, Instagram, and Performing Authenticity in Public (2023)
    American Studies Association Conference 2023 - Montreal, Canada
  • Post45 Graduate Symposium (2023)
    Department of English at the University of Washington - Seattle, Washington
  • Publisher-Platform Data Relationships (2023)
    Exploring the Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy, co-sponsored by The Engleberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU School of Law and Library Futures - New York, New York
  • Rupi Kaur and Reception Data (2023)
    Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) - Seattle, Washington
  • The Social Media Lives of Texts: Reception in the Age of the Internet (2023)
    New Horizons in Digital Humanities & Cultural Data Science at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) - Hong Kong, Hong Kong
  • The Social Media Lives of Texts: Reception in the Age of the Internet (2023)
    Digital Humanities Series Department of English at Duke University - Durham, North Carolina
  • What Do Readers Value? Manually Tagging and Quantitatively Measuring ‘Aspects’ in Goodreads Reviews (2023)
    Text as Data (TADA) - Amherst, MA
  • BERT for Social Sciences and Humanities (2022)
    ICWSM - Atlanta, GA
  • Computational Reception and Readership Studies (2022)
    The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) Conference - Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Data as Culture (2022)
    Women in Data Science Conference, Claremont College - Claremont, California
  • Online Readership and Perception of Genre Over Time (2022)
    Digital Humanities Conference - Tokyo, Japan (Virtual)
  • Toward a Critical Data Pedagogy: American Studies Perspectives in the Digital Humanities Classroom (2022)
    American Studies Association Conference - New Orleans, LA
  • BERT for Humanists: Uses, Challenges, Translations (2021)
    ACH Conference - Virtual
  • Computational Approaches to Book Reviews (2021)
    ACH Conference - Virtual
  • Library Circulation Histories Workshop (2021)
    National Endowment for the Humanities Workshop - Virtual
  • Multilingual NLP as Interface (2021)
    DARIAH Conference - Virtual
  • New Histories of Quantitative and Computational Methods (2021)
    MLA Annual Convention - Toronto, Canada (Virtual)
  • Social Textworking: Books, Readers, and Online Media (2021)
    SHARP Conference - Virtual
  • The Crowdsourced ‘Classics’ and the Revealing Limits of Goodreads Data (2020)
    DH - Ottawa, Canada (Virtual)
  • Between Readers: A Short Methodological History of Networked Reading (2019)
    MLA Annual Convention - Chicago, IL
  • Documenting Twitter Prot (2019)
    American Studies Association - Honolulu, HI
  • Mapping the Librotraficante Movement (2019)
    Global DH Symposium - East Lansing, MI
  • New Horizons in Network Analysis (2019)
    ACH Conference - Pittsburgh, PA
  • The Crowdsourced ‘Classics (2019)
    Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present - College Park, MD
  • Working with Twitter Data (2019)
    Day of Data – Cornell University Library - Ithaca, NY
  • James Baldwin, #BlackLivesMatter, and Networks of Textual Recirculation (2018)
    DH 2018 Conference - Mexico City, Mexico
  • Kurt Vonnegut Unstuck in Time for $1.99: Amazon Kindle Worlds and the Readerly Reimagination of Postwar American Fiction (2018)
    Post45 Graduate Symposium - New Haven, CT
  • Access (2017)
    Text Mining the Novel (NovelTM) Workshop - Montreal, Canada
  • Archives Unleashed (2017)
    Web Archiving Workshop for Researchers - San Francisco, CA
  • Cultural Analytics (2017)
    Computational and Data-Intensive Cultural Studies Symposium - South Bend, IN
  • Geospatial Workshop (2017)
    Text Mining the Novel (NovelTM) Workshop - South Bend, IN
  • James Baldwin’s New Media Readers (2017)
    Global DH Symposium - East Lansing, MI
  • Stories of Dissent: Rereading #Ferguson (2017)
    American Studies Association - Chicago, IL
  • Tweets of a Native Son: James Baldwin and the Literary-Critical Use of a Social Media Archive (2017)
    Midwest Modern Language Association - St. Louis, MO