Melanie Walsh
Assistant Professor, Information School, and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Washington
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 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, often focusing on the social lives of books and readers.
Seminar: Can LLMs Read and Write Poetry?
How can we test and evaluate LLM performance on humanistic "tasks" like poetry generation and classification? How do the texts already known — or "memorized" — by LLMs affect their performance on these tasks? A discussion of key concepts for applied use of LLMs, including training data, memorization, classification, and classification metrics.
Reading List
Reading List
- Porter, Brian, and Edouard Machery. "AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably." Scientific Reports 14, 26133 (2024).https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-76900-1.
- Walsh, Melanie, Anna Preus, and Maria Antoniak. "Sonnet or Not, Bot? Poetry Evaluation for Large Models and Datasets." Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024. https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.914
Supplemental readings:
- D'Souza, Lyra, and David Mimno. "The Chatbot and the Canon: Poetry Memorization in LLMs." Computational Humanities Research Conference: CHR 2023. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3558/paper5712.pdf
- Reisner, Alex. "These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech." The Atlantic, September 25, 2023.
- Walsh, Melanie, Anna Preus, and Elizabeth Gronski. "Does ChatGPT have a Poetic Style." Computational Humanities Research Conference: CHR 2024. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2410.1529
Keywords
Keywords
training data; memorization; task; classification; classification metrics (precision, recall, f1)
Public Talk:
Viral Authors: Postwar American Literature in the Age of Social Media and AI
Drawn from her book in progress, Melanie Walsh explored 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 traced 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 showed how Reddit and 4chan users mobilize his persona to debate the value of reading itself, echoing scholarly disputes. The talk suggested that the same dynamics seen in social media — quotation, misquotation, and the paradoxical elevation and erasure of the author — anticipate the destabilizations now unfolding in the age of AI.
Publications
Publications
Melanie Walsh, "'Infinite Jest,' the Internet, and the Politics of Reading", Los Angeles Review of Books, April 22, 2026.
Viral Authors: Postwar American Literature in the Age of Social Media and AI
