About
The Cultural Analytics Research and Teaching Initiative (CARTi) aims to promote the sustainability and expansion of Cultural Analytics (CA), particularly for early-career scholars and students. CA represents a convergence among researchers from data science, information science, social sciences, and the humanities who share the goal of using data-driven and computational methods to study cultural materials.
As a group of teacher-scholars working at the intersection of these fields, we seek to expand the benefits of our existing collaborative efforts outward by:
- establishing clearer roadmaps for how to conduct CA scholarship;
- sharing the models we develop with early-career CA practitioners and refining our work based on their ideas;
- generating recommendations for research and teaching best practices in CA that home departments can use when considering cultural analytics scholars for tenure and promotion;
- and sharing scholarly outputs such as conference presentations and peer reviewed articles.
Recent Work by Members
Grants and Meetings
- SPEED in Research Grant for “Cultural Analytics Research and Teaching Initiative Workshop,” Washington University in St. Louis, Summer 2023.
Seminars and Presentations
- Modeling Culture: New Humanities Practices in the Age of AI. Monthly seminar series. Princeton University, 2025–6.
- Sustaining Cultural Analytics Research and Teaching: The Future of Code and Data Work in DH. DH 2024 Conference. George Mason University, August 2024.
- Cultural Analytics Pedagogies Roundtable. Association of Computers and the Humanities. June/July 2023.
Selected Publications
- Melanie Walsh, Anna Preus, and Elizabeth Gronski. Does ChatGPT Have a Poetic Style? Computational Humanities Research, December 2024.
- Melanie Walsh, Maria Antoniak, and Anna Preus. Sonnet or Not, Bot? Poetry Evaluation for Large Models and Datasets. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP, November 2024.
- John Ladd & Zoe LeBlanc. Edge Cases: The Making of Network Navigator and Critical Approaches to DH Tools. Journal of Digital History 3, July 2024.
- Matthew Lavin. Modular Bibliographical Profiling of Historic Book Reviews. Journal of Open Humanities Data, March 2024.
- Gabi Kirilloff. Computation as Context: New Approaches to the Close/Distant Reading Debate. College Literature, Winter 2022.
People
Gabi Kirilloff
Gabi Kirilloff, Assistant Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, uses digital methods to examine patterns and outliers in text-based corpora. Her work often combines computation and close reading to examine the relationship between gender and agency. Kirilloff's book project, Keeping the Reader Close, employs computational analysis alongside close reading to examine reader address in a corpus of over 3,000 nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone novels.
John Ladd
John Ladd is an Assistant Professor of Computing and Information Studies at Washington & Jefferson College. He teaches and researches on the use of data across a wide variety of domains, especially in cultural and humanities contexts, as well as on the histories of information and technology. He has published essays and web projects on humanities data science and cultural analytics, computational bibliography, the history of data, and network analysis.
Matthew Lavin
Matthew Lavin, Assistant Professor of Humanities Analytics at Denison University, is a book historian and scholar of literature who specializes in quantitative and computational methods. His research interests include American literature; Willa Cather studies; the history of authorship, readership, and publishing; cultural analytics curriculum and pedagogy; reproducibility; open data for the humanities; and the position of cultural analytics within and beyond the digital humanities.
Zoë LeBlanc
Zoë LeBlanc is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research sits at the intersection of histories of information and digital humanities. In her scholarship and teaching, she explores how, through the lens of information, knowledge and power have been produced over time (especially in relation to liberation politics), and connect this perspective to contemporary debates over data and society, as well as the use (and misuse) of digital methods in the humanities.
Anna Preus
Anna Preus, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Washington, studies early 20th-century literature in English and data science in the humanities. She is interested in how historical print cultures are being transferred online through large- and small-scale text digitization efforts and in how digital resources can help us tell new kinds of stories about literary history. Her current book project, Publishing Empire: Colonial Authorship and British Literature, 1900-1940, offers a pre-history of postcolonial publishing in England that is informed by historical data.
Melanie Walsh
Melanie Walsh is an Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. Her research interests include data science, digital humanities, cultural analytics, contemporary literature, and library and information science. She investigates how data and computational methods shape contemporary culture—such as the publishing industry and public libraries—and how they can be used to understand culture in turn.