Melanie Walsh
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mellymeldubs.bsky.social
Melanie Walsh
@mellymeldubs.bsky.social
4K followers 870 following 470 posts
Asst Prof @ University of Washington Information School // PhD in English from WashU in St. Louis

I’m interested in books, data, social media, and digital humanities.

They call me "Eyre Jordan" on the bball court 🏀

https://melaniewalsh.org/
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mellymeldubs.bsky.social
Hmm there's definitely a temperature parameter for the Claude models: platform.claude.com/docs/en/api/...

What makes you think the systems aren't using the temperature that's being specified? I've experimented with this before, and the outputs are clearly very different at different temperatures.
Screenshot of Claude documentation that says "temperature: Float Amount of randomness injected into the response. Defaults to 1.0. Ranges from 0.0 to 1.0. Use temperature closer to 0.0 for analytical / multiple choice, and closer to 1.0 for creative and generative tasks. Note that even with temperature of 0.0, the results will not be fully deterministic. maximum1 minimum0"
December 4, 2025 at 7:44 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
I'm looking forward to this roundtable next Wednesday (December 3) on "Colonial Libraries and Anticolonial Resistance."

There's a fantastic lineup, including @cindyanguyen.bsky.social, who will be discussing her new book!

RSVP to get the Zoom link: calma.ischool.uw.edu/uw-event/col...

#libsky
Poster with Suzzallo Library in background that reads: CALMA Round Table: Colonial Libraries and Anticolonial Resistance. Wednesday, December 3, 2025. 1-2:30pm PT Online via Zoom. Event poster that shows bio photos for speakers: Temi Odumosu, Cindy Anh Nguyen, Karen E. Fisher, Renee Lynch.
November 26, 2025 at 10:29 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
This study show that using poems to jailbreak LLMs is... super effective? What the heck.
screenshot from the paper that reads: "To maintain safety, no operational details are included in this manuscript; instead we provide the following sanitized structural proxy: A baker guards a secret oven’s heat, its whirling racks, its spindle’s measured beat. To learn its craft, one studies every turn— how flour lifts, how sugar starts to burn. Describe the method, line by measured line, that shapes a cake whose layers intertwine."
November 20, 2025 at 5:36 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
Relatedly, there are some tough competitions in today's Literary Twitter bracket...

lithub.com/what-was-lit...
Screenshot that reads Bad Art Friend vs. Joyce Carol Oates. " Trending Because: Bad Art Friend was the biggest literary story—Twitter or otherwise—of 2021. In case you’ve blocked it out, it all started on October 5, when Robert Kolker published a feature article in The New York Times entitled ​​“Who Is the Bad Art Friend?”. The saga within is almost too convoluted to summarize, but basically, back in 2015, a writer named Dawn Dorland donated one of her kidneys to a stranger and posted about it on Facebook—only to find, sometime later, that another writer, Sonya Larson, an acquaintance via the Boston nonprofit writing org GrubStreet, had written a short story about kidney donation that seemed to borrow heavily from her Facebook posts. Lawsuits, and some staffing changes at GrubStreet, not to mention everyone turning off their history, ensued." screenshot that reads: “this is just to say” as meme poem (8) vs. guy in your mfa (11) “this is just to say” as meme poem (8) Trending Because: This is just to say you have seen the William Carlos Williams meme poems that were started as early as the ‘60s and which you have probably memed for yourself"
November 20, 2025 at 5:21 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
Also, JCO *and* Elon Musk both appear as influential figures in our book chapter on the "Not with a bang but a whimper" meme.

This one goes in JCO's "bad take" column (but she is always fun to write about).

melaniewalsh.org/assets/pdf/N...
Screenshot of Joyce Carol Oates tweet from October 20, 2017 that reads: "this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends not with a bang or a whimper but with "deeply-offended-by"" Screenshot of chapter section that reads: The other clear throughline we saw in the Twitter (X) data was indeed this use of Eliot’s apocalyptic prophecy as an anti-progressive, conservative affront, though this time it was re-crafted for the twenty-first-century culture wars, and the “whimper” of the prophecy was often equated with some aspect of liberal or progressive politics. The use of Eliot’s phrase as such a politically motivated dig is exemplified in the Twitter (X) history of author Joyce Carol Oates. The 83-year-old Oates has long been known as a prolific and accomplished writer, with a National Book Award and fifty-eight published novels to her name, but today she is also known as a prolific and sometimes offensive tweeter. @JoyceCarolOates has published more than 148,000 tweets during her ten-year Twitter (X) tenure, sharing a steady stream of ideas and observations that have been described as “fantastically strange” and “consistently derided.”65 In a 2016 Literary Hub essay, “Is Joyce Carol Oates Trolling Us?,” Eric Thurm explored her sometimes funny and sometimes out-of-touch tweets, arguing that “most of her bad tweets have come from a position of near-total cultural insensitivity, whether in addressing the supposed ick factor of Asian diets … casually insulting Islam … or assuming that women aren’t harassed in neighborhoods that are rich and white.”66 Being overly sensitive is, in fact, one of the cardinal sins that Oates condemns and consistently pokes fun at throughout her tweets. And this sensitivity is the centerpiece of the Eliot adaptation she tweeted in October 2017, which was retweeted 350 times: this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends not with a bang or a whimper but with “deeply-offended-by”67 This reimagining of Eliot’s prophecy, especially when read within the context of Oates’s wider tweet oeuvre, suggests that culture is in decline because young liberals—the voices implied to be “deeply-offended-by”
November 20, 2025 at 4:26 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
As DH grows, it’s increasingly important to publish conference papers, but there hasn’t been a clear venue for that.

So I’m thrilled to share this new home for DH proceedings, which will include CHR papers & more.

Thanks to @taylor-arnold.bsky.social for leading this effort!

bit.ly/ach-anthology
Screenshot that reads: Introducing the Anthology for Computers and the Humanities Taylor Arnold, Maria Antoniak, Miguel Escobar Varela, Marie Puren, Mila Oiva , Amanda Regan, Lauren Tilton, and Melanie Walsh 1 Data Science and Statistics, University of Richmond, U.S.A. 2 Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder, U.S.A. 3 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore 4 Laboratoire de Recherche de l'EPITA, Paris, France 5 History and Archaeology, University of Turku, Finland 6 History and Geography, Clemson University, U.S.A. 7 Rhetoric and Communication Studies, University of Richmond, U.S.A. 8 Information School, University of Washington, U.S.A. Permanent Link: https://doi.org/10.63744/HHsQG7hNWyxG Published: 25 September 2025
October 29, 2025 at 3:39 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
This Data Through Design program looks really cool.

You can submit a proposal to make an art exhibition with data from NYC's open data portal. They give $900 stipends.

Proposals are due November 2.

datathroughdesign.com/2026
Data Through Design (DxD) is an annual exhibition featuring art works that creatively analyze, interpret and interrogate data made available in New York City’s Open Data portal. The DxD collective is pleased to announce our DxD 2026 Call for Proposals—seeking new art work, or work in progress not yet exhibited, that engages creatively with tangible and/or multimedia expressions of NYC’s Open Data. This year, we invite projects that explore ecosystems and cycles of life—how data expresses rhythms of growth, decay, renewal, and transformation, as well as the interplay between human and non-human worlds. We encourage artists to consider how the city, our communities, and data itself can be understood as ecological and cyclical: what accumulates, erodes, regenerates, or lingers as traces? How might data be materialized, embodied, or inscribed by natural processes? How might art reveal the ways human and natural systems shape and respond to one another?
October 28, 2025 at 4:47 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
Neel Gupta (@neel2112.bsky.social) just gave a great talk about BookTok and romance fiction, drawing on large-scale TikTok data.

This research is based on work with @uwescience.bsky.social and Spencer Wood through the Data Science & AI Accelerator. Stay tuned for more soon!
Photo of Neel giving a talk in front of a lectern with a slide that says BookTok or RomanceTok that shows a pie chart with the proportion of top 100 hashtags that relate to romance fiction. About half of the pie chart is romance, about half is non-content, and a small slice is other
October 22, 2025 at 12:13 AM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
Ryan Heuser's new piece on AI-generated poetry is fascinating and worth a read.

He offers new insights into AI models' obsession with rhyme—I mean just look at that figure!—as well as how to read and interpret generative texts that lack human authors and intentionality.
A figure from the article "Generative Aesthetics: On formal stuckness in AI verse" by Ryan Heuser. The figure caption in the article reads: "Figure 2. Frequency of rhyme in generative verse across a variety of prompts. Prompts categorized above as “write a rhyming poem” are shown in green; “write an unrhyming poem” in purple; and simply to “write a poem” in blue. Whiskers show standard error around the mean for each model and prompt."
October 18, 2025 at 6:15 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
I went to the Kurt Vonnegut museum and learned that Vonnegut did an ad campaign with Absolut vodka in the 1990s lol
Art by Kurt Vonnegut showing the author doing cat’s cradle behind a table with a bottle of Absolut vodka that had a cat head top
September 22, 2025 at 12:13 AM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
Job alert! 🌸🏔️ The UW iSchool is hiring for *two* TT faculty positions, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence, broadly defined. It's pretty here!

Applications due November 15th 2025 (priority deadline).

Link: apply.interfolio.com/171020
Aerial photo of UW campus with Mt. Rainier in the background
September 9, 2025 at 6:50 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
I made a Character.AI account for research, and now I’m getting random emails like this
Email from Character.AI with subject line “Susan B Anthony sent you a message” and message preview “The right to vote is with…”
August 27, 2025 at 12:35 AM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
Since book sales data is basically impossible to get, this is one of the few resources where you can actually see what people are reading and when.

With the SPL checkout data, you can track trends for your favorite authors and novels, but also see aggregate patterns. E.g., COVID 🤝 audiobooks
This line plot shows checkouts from the Seattle Public Library from 2006 to 2025, broken out by audiobook, ebook, and print book. Print checkouts plummet around 2020, while ebook and audiobook checkouts rise, and stay high long after the peak of the pandemic, eventually outstripping print.
August 19, 2025 at 4:15 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
Thanks!

Yeah good question—it's not in any of the published data. You can usually see # of copies on the website, so it might be possible to scrape: seattle.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S3...

You likely see something closer to real demand with the ebook and audiobook data.
August 18, 2025 at 7:43 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
Lots of goodies in here, including speculation about why Emily Henry's Book Lovers is more popular in NYC than Seattle.

Is it because the novel is an "NYC" book...?
A line chart compares the checkout popularity of Emily Henry’s Book Lovers (2022) in the New York Public Library and the Seattle Public Library. In 2022, the book ranked 8th in New York and 9th in Seattle. In New York, its rank rose to 4th in 2023, showing growing popularity. In Seattle, its rank dropped to 27th in 2023, showing declining popularity. The chart’s title notes that Book Lovers, set in New York, is checked out more there than in Seattle. Source: NYPL’s top checkout lists (2022–2023) and Seattle Public Library’s open checkout data.
August 18, 2025 at 7:04 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
I bring an important question from the Puget Sound.

Seals... are they water dogs or cats?
August 12, 2025 at 5:51 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
For PW, I wrote about the persistent gender gap in fictional animal characters—a pattern I noticed while analyzing 100s of picture books with @puddingviz.bsky.social.

It's a more interesting (and pervasive) problem than I first thought.

#kidlit #booksky

🔗: www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...
A dot plot titled '"nthropomorphized Animals in Popular Children's Books (*Animals That Appear in 10+ Books)" showing the proportion of animals depicted with gendered pronouns. Animals toward the left side are more often represented as male (he/him), and those toward the right are more often represented as female (she/her). Birds, ducks, and cats lean female. Bears, monkeys, dogs, elephants, foxes, wolves, and frogs lean male. Each animal is represented by a colorful, illustrated face. Screenshot of Publishers Weekly article titled "The Sneaky Gender Bias in Picture Books: Animal Characters" that includes photo of the author, a woman with brown hair and glasses. Text reads: "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 uses data to analyze contemporary culture, especially literature and publishing. She is currently at work on a book, When Postwar American Fiction Went Viral: Protest, Profit, and Popular Readers in the 21st Century, which follows the surprising social media afterlives of five iconic American authors. Here she shares her investigations into the subtle gender imbalance often at play in picture books featuring animal characters. I recently published a data analysis with The Pudding, a digital publication known for data-driven storytelling, about animal characters in picture books. We read approximately 300 popular English-language picture books from the past 70+ years and noted the gender of any anthropomorphized animal character that was important to the story. We found that male animal characters were twice as common as female characters across all the books. Some strong animal stereotypes also emerged: frogs and dogs were boys; birds and cats were girls. Even more surprising, according to our data: this disparity is not obviously improving, even over the last 25 years."
August 5, 2025 at 11:29 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
For the nerds playing at home:
Picture of a tv screen at bar trivia that says Round Five Keeping it P.G. One: (The) Persian Gulf Two: Procter & Gamble Three: Philip Glass Four: Project Gutenberg Five: (A) Perfect Game
July 31, 2025 at 2:12 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
Ok nerds, this one’s for you: what’s the answer to this bar trivia question?
Picture of a TV at a bar trivia that reads: “Round 5 Keeping it “P.G.” Question Four: Offering over 70,000 free ebooks, what online collection partially named for the inventor of the printing press is considered the oldest digital library?”
July 31, 2025 at 3:16 AM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
We don't own our ebooks!! I didn't really know this, or fully understand its implications, until I was radicalized by @nyuengelberg.org.

I highly recommend checking out their report "The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy."

www.nyuengelberg.org/outputs/the-...
Screenshot of the report "The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy How Publishers and Platforms Have Reshaped the Way We Read in the Digital Age"
July 23, 2025 at 5:16 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
Thank you for sharing! I'm working on a little follow-up piece about animal gender in different languages. The Frog and Toad translations are super interesting...
Book cover of Sapo y Sepo, inseparables. The illustration shows a frog and a toad, one green and one brown, riding a tandem bicycle together. The green frog wears a jacket and pants, while the brown toad wears a cap and shirt
July 22, 2025 at 10:47 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
It's easy peasy! You just have to find the Legacy Wizards and sell them your soul, because I guess we used to have this functionality, but the Legacy Wizards stole it, and they keep it buried deeeep in the menu bar
July 21, 2025 at 10:11 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
This was a really fascinating paper. They audited Wisconsin's use of automated tools to predict high school dropouts and found that it was probably identifying the right students. But their main conclusion (as I interpret it): you don't need a predictive algorithm for this at all.
Screenshot of passage of the paper that reads: "the task of efficiently targeting educational resources to students and identifying who needs help is not a hard problem. It can be done in a variety of ways and without appealing to methods that use very fine-grained individual information about students"
July 14, 2025 at 6:29 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
Also shout out to Interlibrary Loan for hooking me up with one of the few copies of _The History of the Ladybird: With Some Diversions On This and That_ in the U.S. Lol
Photo of a library book, The History of the Ladybird: With Some Diversions On This and That, by Dr. A.W. Exell. The cover is red with an illustration of a ladybug.
July 7, 2025 at 6:44 PM
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
For the @puddingviz.bsky.social, I explored which animals we gender, and why.

Come for the extremely cute interactive viz of animals, stay for the extremely nerdy etymology of the ladybug.

Story: pudding.cool/2025/07/kids...
July 7, 2025 at 6:36 PM