Anna Preus (she/her)

I study 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 at work on a book titled Publishing Empire: Colonial Authorship and British Literature, 1900-1940, which offers an early history of the global turn in British literature, highlighting breakout literary works by authors from South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Oceania who published in England before 1940. I am also at work on multiple collaborative projects. I am co-editor of a digital edition of Hope Mirrlees's modernist long poem, Paris. I have worked on multiple projects on Large Language Models and poetry, specifically LLMs' capacities for poetry generation, poetic form evaluation, and handling visual formatting, and I am involved with the collaborative projects Responsible Datasets in Context and the Cultural Analytics Research and Teaching Initiative. My work has appeared in ELH: English Literary History, EMNLP: Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, the Journal of Open Humanities Data, 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, co-lead the Humanities Data Science Summer Institute, serve as core faculty in the Textual and Digital Studies program, and as a Data Science Fellow with the eScience Institute.