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, and contemporary literature. She investigates how data and computational methods shape contemporary culture, and how they can be used to understand culture in turn. She 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. She is also co-PI of the NEH-funded AI 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 the Digital Humanities Awards voted the “Best Digital Humanities Training Material” of 2021.

Image: Dave Burbank