Viral Authors: Postwar American Literature in the Age of Social Media and AI

Drawn from her book in progress, Melanie Walsh will explore how social media—and now AI—have transformed the circulation and representation of 20th-century literary works. Combining data, archival research, and close readings, she traces how readers over the last 25 years have redistributed texts and reconfigured writerly authority, often toward powerful, though not always progressive, social and political ends. A case study on David Foster Wallace shows how Reddit and 4chan users mobilize his persona to debate the value of reading itself, echoing scholarly disputes. More broadly, the talk suggests that the same dynamics we see in social media—quotation, misquotation, and the paradoxical elevation and erasure of the author—anticipate the destabilizations now unfolding in the age of AI.

Melanie Walsh is an Assistant Professor in the Information School and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Washington. She is also a member of the Executive Council for the new Center for Advances in Libraries, Archives, and Museums (CALMA). She is a former Postdoctoral Associate in Information Science at Cornell University and received her PhD in English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis.

Her research interests include data science, digital humanities, literature, libraries, and social media. She investigates how data and computational methods shape contemporary culture, and how they can be used to understand culture in turn. She often focuses on the social lives of books and readers.

Her current work includes a book project, When Postwar American Fiction Went Viral: Protest, Profit, and Popular Readers in the 21st Century, which follows the social media afterlives of American authors. She also designed and released a free, open-source textbook, Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python, which introduces the programming language Python to people interested in the humanities and social sciences.

With collaborators, she leads several projects, which include Post45 Data Collective, Responsible Datasets in Context, and AI for Humanists.

Throughout 2025–26, CDH will host six public talks by leading scholars in Cultural Analytics. Open to all, the series invites audiences to explore the histories, theories, and practices that shape the evolving intersection of AI and the humanities.

Since the release of ChatGPT, conversations about artificial intelligence (AI) have generated both excitement and concern across the humanities. Much of the debate has focused on political and ethical questions—bias, labor, environmental impact, and intellectual property—as well as the effects of large language models (LLMs) on teaching and learning. Yet one question remains underexplored: how might AI contribute directly to humanities scholarship?

Modeling Culture is generously funded by an AI Lab Seed grant, with additional support from the Humanities Council and the Princeton Humanities Initiative. Thank you to the Department of English for co-sponsorship of the public talks.