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. Her research interests include data science, digital humanities, cultural analytics, contemporary literature, media studies, and library and information science. She investigates how data and computational methods shape contemporary culture—such as social media, publishing, and 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 the What’s Seattle Reading? project. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mozilla Foundation, and Schmidt Sciences.