Melanie Walsh is an assistant professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. 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 co-editor of the Post45 Data Collective, a peer-reviewed, open-access repository for literary and cultural data from 1945 to the present.
Melanie Walsh
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Writing on Public Books
What 35 Years of Data Can Tell Us about Who Will Win the National Book Award
We may never know what goes on in the rooms where literary prizes are decided, but thanks to data, we know exactly who was there.
Where Is All the Book Data?
Industry is already using data to remake culture. To reverse the tide—to make culture more equitable—we need to decode that data for ourselves.
