Anna Preus (she/her)

I study early 20th-century literature in English and data science in the humanities. I am especially 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. I am currently working on a book titled Publishing Empire: Colonial Authorship and British Literary Production, 1900-1940, which offers a pre-history of postcolonial publishing England that is informed by historical data. With Melanie Walsh, I am at work on interrelated projects focused on the capacities of Large Language Models for poetry generation and poetic form evaluation, and with Melanie Micir, I am co-editor of a digital edition of Hope Mirrlees's modernist long poem, Paris. I am also one of the leaders of the collaborative project Responsible Datasets in Context. My work has appeared or is forthcoming in ELH: English Literary History, EMNLP Findings, Feminist Modernist Studies, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, and the edited collection Expressive Networks: Poetry and Platform Cultures. My research has been supported by ACLS, the Mellon Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities. At UW I lead the Humanities Data Lab and co-lead the AI, Creativity, and Humanities Research Cluster. I am also core faculty in the Textual and Digital Studies program and a Data Science Fellow with the eScience Institute.