Melanie Walsh

A protest bot is a bot so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit A Call for Bots of Conviction In 1965 the singer-songwriter Phil Ochs told an audience that “a protest song is a song that’s so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit.” Ochs was introducing his an...

Years ago I wrote this essay about protest bots, which is exactly how I would describe @nps-uncensored.bsky.social.

GitHub - the-pudding/data: Data sets created for stories on The Pudding, open to the public. Data sets created for stories on The Pudding, open to the public. - the-pudding/data

Data from the @puddingviz.bsky.social always makes for great final projects, too!

github.com/the-pudding/...

Top 500 “Greatest” Novels (1021-2015) – Responsible Datasets in Context

Yes lots of great cultural datasets at RDIC!

Top 500 "Greatest" Novels includes cool metadata like Goodreads #s + full text for public domain works: www.responsible-datasets-in-context.com/posts/top-50...

We just added library checkouts too: www.responsible-datasets-in-context.com/posts/spl-50...

Anddd the post has been tagged for nudity. 😱 You know where it definitely hasn't been tagged for nudity? X.

Haha it worked! 🫠

Screenshot of Joyce Carol Oates quote posting another post about her that says "She is one of the greatest tweets of all time." JCO's post is simply an image from Jan van Eyck's Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych showing a skeleton with bat wings (representing Death?) towering over a bunch of suffering naked human bodies who are partly being devoured by monstrous creatures.

Wow JCO is really leaning into her power on X.

Honestly I might adopt DFW's resume section headers:

PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS &c (IF ANYBODY CARES...)

Passage from D.T. Max's biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, that reads: "under which auspices it hosted the Review of Contemporary Fiction and the Dalkey Archive Press, the publisher of Wittgenstein’s Mistress. When he had heard of the job opening, Steve Moore had contacted Wallace. Wallace had promised himself not to teach while he finished Infinite Jest, but he had been writing the manuscript steadily and successfully. So in bandana and boots, he went for a brief interview at the MLA conference in New York in December 1992. He was unusually self-confident, perhaps buoyed by a sense that Infinite Jest was on target. “You should know I am really really smart,” he told the English department members who met him. He sent a résumé with his publications and on the second page added entries for “REVIEWS IF ANYBODY CARES...” and “PRIZES &c (IF ANYBODY CARES... ).”

In 1992, David Foster Wallace interviewed for a job at the MLA conference wearing boots and a bandana. Man the 90s were another world...

From D.T. Max's biography of Wallace.

My next undergrad researcher came to me with a vague curiosity and I just shoved Post45 at her and said “this is what you should look at and strive to try to contribute to”

BookReconciler P - Metadata Enrichment and Work-Level Clustering • Who is this for? Digital humanities researchers, librarians, metadata specialists, and more. • What does it do? Finds, clusters, and enriches records for books. Adding ISBNS, HathiTrust IDs, subject headings, descriptions, page counts, publication dates, and more. To learn more about this tool's design, motivations, and related work, or to cite this tool, please see the following paper: "BookReconciler * •: An Open-Source Tool for Metadata Enrichment and Work-Level Clustering". ' Matt Miller, Dan Sinykin, and Melanie Walsh. Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. December 2025.

GitHub - Post45-Data-Collective/BookReconciler: BookReconciler, A Tool for Metadata Enrichment and Clustering of Book Data github.com/Post45-Data-Co… #AI #metadata #libraries #books

🤩

Text "United States Department of Agriculture. Transporting Watermelons in Bulk and Bin by Truck." Illustration of a semi truck with a watermelon as its trailer.

All reports in this thread are from the collections of Northwestern University's Transportation Library. Materials we've digitized can generally be found in HathiTrust. Learn more and search our catalog here: www.library.northwestern.edu/libraries-co...

A screenshot from a scam website targeting authors that claims to work with Zadie Smith and Colson Whitehead both of whom are Black people but the photos of them are AI generated generic white people

Well today in AI scams targeting authors. I received an email claiming to want to include my book in a book club. Not only do all the photos of authors they claim to work with look AI generated but look at @colsonwhitehead.com and @zadiesmith.bsky.social and then look at these photos

Our Tools – Post45 Data Collective

We presented on our tool for enriching and clustering book data at Code4Lib today. Check it out, and let us know what you think!

data.post45.org/our-tools.html

Huge thanks to @thisismattmiller.com for leading development on this project.

#code4lib #c4l26

Whoa!! What a rockstar. Also I love that they’re doing a Read-a-thon.

Honestly really good precis.

The Handbasket 100% independent journalism by Marisa Kabas

Now that CNN and WBD are set to become state media in a sale to Paramount/Oracle/TikTok, it is especially important to support independent media.

Off the top of my head:

www.thehandbasket.co
404media.co
www.garbageday.email

Add your favorites in the replies. Fuck state-backed media monopolies.

Aww I love the happy map 🥲

Today I'm probably up north on Taste & Smell island because I stumbled upon a free DIY Italian Soda event.

Netflix Declines to Raise Offer for Warner Bros. - About Netflix

Netflix won't counter Ellison's offer.

Ladies and gentleman, the full right wing power grab is here and will now be beamed into every home on CBS, CNN, HBO, movies from Warner and Paramount.

about.netflix.com/en/news/netf...

Kansas informs trans residents their driver’s licenses become invalid on Thursday Some transgender Kansans said they had received the letters from the Department of Revenue. Others hadn’t by Wednesday evening.

“‘The persecution is the point,’ said Rep. Abi Boatman, a Wichita Democrat and the only transgender member of the Legislature, who received the [Kansas Dept of Revenue] notice on Wednesday.” To underscore that: a Kansas state legislator is among those whose driver’s license will be voided. (🎁 link:)

Help me: I'm writing a thing for the book about the history of adjectival uses of "dad" (as in, "dad joke," "dad rock," "dad bod," etc...) and I need more examples. I want a very long, idiosyncratic list.

So, what do you have?

‘Shaking it off’: the science of dad dancing – and why it’s good for you Viral video of Prince William prompts experts to laud benefits of men ‘communicating their hormones’, from lifting mood to boosting trust

Umm dad dancing (this article is weird) www.theguardian.com/society/arti...

So awesome to see this international bestseller data *out in the world*! That's the goal!

Thanks to @jamesfolta.com, @literaryhub.bsky.social, and F. Poretti for these great pieces.

International Bestsellers Dataset Featured on Lit Hub & Substack – Post45 Data Collective James Folta (@jamesfolta.com) and F. Poretti (@fporetti) dive into our International Bestsellers dataset to investigate what the world has been reading and what great books we might have been sleeping...

James Folta (@jamesfolta.com) and F. Poretti (@fporetti on Substack) dive into our International Bestsellers dataset to investigate what the world has been reading and what great books we might have been sleeping on. data.post45.org/news/intl-be...

“All of the Above” demonstrates the significance of embracing curiosity while creating space for multiple answers. [SBIFF] All of the Above, Allison Walsh, John Camardella, documentary, Kartemquin Films, Santa Barbara International Film Festival,

From #SBIFF2026: Filmmaker Allison Walsh premiered her feature debut doc ALL OF THE ABOVE.

It’s a surprisingly perceptive look at what happens when the concept of religion is separated from absolutes and is given space for exploration and understanding. #SBIFF

Totally agree! As a person who loves to make weird little things on the internet, @samplereality.bsky.social is definitely one of my role models. I'd buy that book in a heartbeat.

An interesting data set to prowl around in while exploring literary hegemony in the U.S.

(I hope folks will attend as much to writers and works unawarded, ungranted, unbestselling as to what's present here. The good stuff's in the margins.)

TFW you discover someone went and did the thing you were struggling to do like 5 years ago. 💖 And it's open data, which is especially remarkable given how much the data broker from France (the only one I was even able to track down) wanted to charge for this kind of data. 😵‍💫

Find your next read in this dataset of international bestsellers. In most situations when I say “I need the data,” I’m referring to gossip, and it’s less of a “need” than what some would call a “messy curiosity.” But recently, I came across a Substack post analyz…

Come “poke around” our data “to find new books and authors [you’ve] never heard of!” @jamesfolta.com makes great use of the Int'l Bestsellers dataset built by @sdileonardi.bsky.social, @beccacohen.bsky.social, & @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social on @literaryhub.bsky.social. lithub.com/find-your-ne...