About
Melanie Walsh is a Postdoctoral Associate in Information Science at Cornell University, where she works with David Mimno’s group. She received her PhD in English & American Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests include digital humanities, cultural analytics, social media, and American literature & culture—preferably all of the above combined.
She designed an undergraduate course and online textbook,
Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python, which prepares students to analyze cultural materials—such as books, movies, historical records, and social media posts—with digital and computational tools.
Education
Ph.D., English & American Literature, Washington University in St. Louis, 2013 – 2019
BA, English, Washington University in St. Louis, 2013, summa cum laude Work Shared in CORE
Presentations
Other Publications
Peer-Reviewed
Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak, “The Goodreads ‘Classics’,”
Cultural Analytics /
Post45, 2021.
Maria Antoniak, Melanie Walsh, and David Mimno, “Tags, Maps, Borders: Social Re-Working of Genre on LibraryThing,” CSCW, 2021.
Melanie Walsh,
“Tweets of a Native Son: The Quotation and Recirculation of James Baldwin from Black Power to #BlackLivesMatter,” American Quarterly, 70, no. 3 (2018).
Work-in-Progress
When Postwar American Fiction Went Viral: Protest, Profit, and Popular Readers in the Twenty-First Century (book project)
Essays and Reviews
“Review: Name That Twitter Community!,” Reviews in Digital Humanities, January 2020.
“Beautifying Beale Street,” Los Angeles Review of Books, December 2018.
“A Conversation with Cathy Davidson: On the Digital in the Humanities and Her Journey to Revolutionize Higher Ed,”
Human Ties, September 2018.
Memberships
MLA, ASA, ASAP, ACH, CSDH/SCHN