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

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.

Blog Posts

    Projects

    Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python

    An open-source, interactive textbook that introduces Python programming for studying cultural materials like books, movies, songs, & social media posts

    Tweets of a Native Sonhttp://www.TweetsofaNativeSon.com

    A website featuring interactive data visualizations about James Baldwin’s digital afterlives

    Memberships

    MLA, ASA, ASAP, ACH, CSDH/SCHN

    Melanie Walsh

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