Post45 Data Collective

👋

data.post45.org

Half way done teaching Intro to Python for humanities - been great! Anyone have ideas for public datasets focused on culture for students to work on for final projects? @mellymeldubs.bsky.social @laurenfklein.bsky.social @nolauren.bsky.social @dmimno.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com @mariaa.bsky.social

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

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...

There's so much great (peer-reviewed!) data hanging out at @post45data.bsky.social for people to explore and play with! 100 years of major prizes (and the judges)! Everyone who went to Iowa Writers' Workshop (and who they studied with)! All NEA lit awardees! The Canon of Asian Am Lit! So much more!

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...

it makes me so happy that a column I once managed at Publishing Trends could be a source for such cool 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…

Stoked to see @jamesfolta.com in @literaryhub.bsky.social talking up a dataset on int'l bestsellers built by @sdileonardi.bsky.social + @beccacohen.bsky.social (I helped). See who the world reads!

One nit: Folta sez "Sinykin is a great follow on Bluesky"—LIES lithub.com/find-your-ne...

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…

"The world doesn’t have terrible taste, it seems."
— @jamesfolta.com writing about the @post45data.bsky.social's International Bestsellers data for
@literaryhub.bsky.social!

lithub.com/find-your-ne...

Publishing flows (no domestic) A Flourish data visualization by cody

When we published international bestseller data with @post45data.bsky.social all I wanted was to make a Sankey diagram but never managed, now someone has. And it looks beautiful. Check it out!

Source: substack.com/home/post/p-...
public.flourish.studio/visualisatio...

Excited to see the dataset being used!!

Literary Nationalism Why don't Americans read more European fiction? Why don't Europeans?

Cool new essay that analyzes data from @post45data.bsky.social to argue for the rise of literary nationalism in parallel with political nationalism substack.com/home/post/p-...

Used Claude Code to analyze three datasets from @post45data.bsky.social together: NEA literature winners; NYT bestsellers; major prize winners. Made a power list of the 51 writers (out of ~7000) who hit all three open.substack.com/pub/sinykin/...

The NEA is a Zombie What Was the NEA?

Started mucking around with data this morning. Made a couple interesting charts from data about all the writers who ever got an NEA grant, with data from Xander Manshel + team. Decided I’d write it up for my first post.
substack.com/home/post/p-...

BookReconciler: An Open-Source Tool for Metadata Enrichment and Work-Level Clustering We present BookReconciler, an open-source tool for enhancing and clustering book data. BookReconciler allows users to take spreadsheets with minimal metadata, such as book title and author, and automa...

A hard problem with literary data is navigating btwn editions of books and what the "work," or the theoretical text that unites all editions. I've been lucky to work with @thisismattmiller.com and @mellymeldubs.bsky.social, who built a tool to address this + do much more

arxiv.org/abs/2512.10165

This project has been supported by the @post45data.bsky.social.

It was initially funded by an NEH grant led by @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and me. Then our NEH got cancelled. But we persisted!

Matt, Dan, and I have been working on this project for years at this point.

Diagram illustrating the BookReconciler workflow. On the left, a book cover of The Book of Salt by Monique Truong appears alongside “Minimal Metadata,” listing Author: Truong, Monique and Title: The Book of Salt. An arrow points to a box labeled “BookReconciler” with book and diamond icons. A downward arrow leads to “Enriched + Clustered Metadata,” showing multiple editions of the book cover and expanded metadata, including several ISBNs, subject headings (e.g., Vietnamese–France fiction, women authors, household employees, gay men, cooking), and an author VIAF identifier.

Very happy to introduce a new tool, BookReconciler!

You can take spreadsheets with book data and add subject headings, descriptions, ISBNs, HathiTrust IDs, & more. You can also cluster editions & variations of the same "Work."

Led by @thisismattmiller.com and supported by @post45data.bsky.social.

Are you a grad student working on post-1945 culture? Could your research benefit from incorporating some data, even minimally? Want feedback from journal editors?

This Post45 Data Collective virtual workshop may be for you!

Applications are due DECEMBER 1: data.post45.org/news/grad-wo...

The Post45 Data Collective invites graduate students in the humanities or adjacent fields to explore cultural data reflexively and collaboratively in a mini-workshop hosted virtually on Friday, March 13. Details here: data.post45.org/news/grad-wo...

Back again with the Selected British Literary Prizes dataset for #TidyTuesday. It was really nice to see LGBTQ+ data included🏳️‍🌈. I also had a look at ethnic diversity across prize institutions and winner vs. shortlist % for nominees from the top 15 unis.
lewis-ward.github.io/tidytuesday/...

A heatmap showing gender and ethnic representation in UK literary prizes, split into two panels for shortlisted authors and winners. The visualization displays counts across ethnicity categories (African, Asian, Black British, Caribbean, Irish, Jewish, Non-UK White, Non-White American, and White British) on the y-axis and gender categories (Man, Non-binary, Transman, and Woman) on the x-axis. Each cell shows the count with white text on a colored background, where darker colors indicate higher counts. White British men show the highest counts in both panels (120 shortlisted, 149 winners), followed by White British women (123 shortlisted, 105 winners). Non-UK White authors also show substantial representation (39 men and 87 women shortlisted; 40 men and 32 women winners). Most other ethnic groups show single-digit counts, with several cells having zero representation. The data reveals that White British authors increase from 46% of shortlisted to 61% of winners, while women decrease from 54% of shortlisted to 43% of winners.

I created a heatmap for this week's #TidyTuesday showing UK literary prize demographics with data from @post45data.bsky.social. White British authors account for 61% of winners vs. 46% shortlisted. Men win 56% vs. 46% shortlisted.

Code: github.com/gkaramanis/t...

#RStats #dataviz

This week's #TidyTuesday data was interesting. I decided to look into the Costa Book Awards and the gender distribution of their winners.

Data: github.com/stats33100/t...

Looked at the percentage of Oxbridge educated people who have won various British Literary Prizes for #TidyTuesday. I used ggbrick and, as the bricks of look like books, tried to make it look like they were in bookshelves with meh results.

Code here: tinyurl.com/bddsuuc3

#rstats | #dataviz

TWO great opportunities for graduate students in post45 literary studies in 2026! The Post45 Graduate Symposium @ Duke and @post45data.bsky.social’s virtual workshop for research with their data sets.

Excited to get to sit in on this workshop! Hopefully, @post45.bsky.social will get the opportunity to publish some articles that emerge from this P45DC event 🤩

We're excited to host a virtual workshop where graduate students can present work-in-progress that engages with data from the Post45 Data Collective in some way.

Editors from the P45DC, Public Books, Post45, and the 19th Century DC will be there to offer feedback.

Proposals are due December 1!

Catching up with hashtag#TidyTuesday.
week 39 - Crane Observations at Lake Hornborgasjön, Sweden (1994–2024)
week 43 - Selected British Literary Prizes (1990-2022)
Both charts created in Observable
Notebooks: observablehq.com/user/@deepal...
#DataViz #JavaScript #Figma

This week's #TidyTuesday is all about who has won or been shortlisted for a British literary prize 📖

I focused on the gender balance of authors awarded prizes for fiction 📊 The changing names of awards made the data wrangling a little bit more tricky!

#RStats #ggplot2 #DataViz

Abstract submission form QR code for the Post45 graduate symposium at Duke, February 20-21, 2026. The form is also accessible at https://tinyurl.com/2e2dr4wv.

The 11th annual Post45 Graduate Symposium will be hosted by Duke University's Department of English, February 20-21, 2026! Check out the CFP (post45.org/graduate/202...) and please share with anyone who might be interested.

Abstracts are due November 14.