Melanie Walsh

Expertise: Social media, data about culture (books, art, etc.), ethics of data and data collection, AI art and writing, large language models, digital humanities, contemporary reading and readers, programming for non-computational audiences

Melanie Walsh is the author of a free, online programming textbook, Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python, which is specifically designed for humanities audiences. Additionally, she is at work on a book, When Postwar American Fiction Went Viral: Protest, Profit, and Popular Readers in the 21st Century, which draws on social media data to examine how literary texts spread online and how they are used by internet communities and political movements. She is also co-PI of the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded “BERT For Humanists” project, which makes recent advances in artificial intelligence accessible to humanities researchers, and she is co-editor of the Post45 Data Collective, a peer-reviewed, open-access repository for literary and cultural data after 1945.