Daniella Maor, ’27; Karalee Harris, ’28
Maor major: Medical anthropology and global health, data science minor
Harris major: Informatics
Project title: “What is Seattle Really Reading?: Public Readership and the Literary Canon”
When an author dies, does readership of their books spike? When a book becomes a film adaptation, do more people check it out of the library? What are the most-read authors in the Seattle Public Library system?
Research from the University of Washington’s “Humanities Data Science Summer Institute” aimed to answer those questions and more.
Daniella Maor and Karalee Harris were a part of a team of students and mentors that delved into the Seattle Public Library’s checkout data — one of the only systems in the country with public data. They looked specifically at authors in the 1945–present volume of the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
“It was really cool to see not only the readership patterns but to think about the underlying causes for those patterns,” said Maor, who is a College Honors student.
For example, most authors saw a spike in checkouts of their work right after they died. Some books saw spikes that related to their plot, like Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 novel “The Parable of the Sower,” which had an increase in checkouts in 2024, seemingly because the book takes place in 2024.
Harris said it was interesting to see how some of these canonical authors are being read in Seattle and how many of the most read authors felt very “Seattle” with popular science fiction or fantasy topics.
“It makes me wonder what this data would look like if it wasn’t Seattle Public Library’s,” Harris said.
Maor’s field of study is in public health, but she said that taking part in a project like this was perfect for her career trajectory.
“This was a really great introduction to research, especially given that we got to present at the Symposium, and we wrote a paper that got published,” Maor said. “The research methods were really informative and will be knowledge that I keep coming back to in my own personal research.”
When asked how looking through this data changed her own reading habits, Maor said, “I guess I should be reading more genre fiction.”
About the Symposium
This undergraduate research project was presented in the 29th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium on May 15, 2026. The Symposium is one of several opportunities UW undergraduates have to engage in the transformative experiences research provides. It’s produced by the Office of Undergraduate Research and is one of the many ways the Office connects undergraduates to the UW’s research ecosystem.
Read the overview of the 2026 Symposium here.