Post45 Data Collective

Hi Bluesky! The Post45 Data Collective is officially here. We publish open datasets on literary prizes, fellowships, books in translation, feminist magazines, NYT bestsellers, and more. data.post45.org Follow us for updates—we’ve got a busy summer ahead!

I draw on several datasets published by the great people at @post45data.bsky.social for this piece, including data.post45.org/posts/nea-cr... from @manshel.bsky.social

Fiction has undergone a huge demographic transformation over the last 50 years. Men lost ground, which women gained. But the way some have written about it, you’d think men are, as a NYT headline suggested, disappearing. Hardly! Women have just caught up. sinykin.substack.com/p/where-have...

August is here, & with it my 287th #ScholarSunday thread of great public scholarly writing & work, podcast episodes, new & forthcoming books from the past week. Add more below, please share as widely as possible, & enjoy, all! 🗃️ + blackwhiteandread.com/scholarsunda...

@post45.bsky.social finally has an instagram. It stinks! (I set it up.) But it kinda works. And it will get better, I promise. For now, it might be easier to find out about our new stuff if you subscribe over there. As always, everything will be at post45.org, too www.instagram.com/post45journal/

Here are just a few of the publishers included in this small press bestseller data: - @blacklawrence.bsky.social - @uglyducklingpresse.bsky.social - @floodeditions.bsky.social - @dorothyproject.bsky.social - @rosemetalpress.bsky.social Check out these publishers & the fascinating data below.

Annulet's "American Poetry and Poetics, 2008–2025" forum is calling and saying omg, please use this for an essay!

This is such a valuable dataset on small press bestsellers, preserving nearly 20 years of SPD's history. So much diligent data curation here, pieced together from social media posts and web archives. Congrats to Sera-Ann Hargrove and @micahbateman.bsky.social on creating this important resource.

This is a great dataset! Among many other things it contains info about many of the poets I would once have considered (and probably on some level still consider) the *cool* poets. Your Fred Moten, your Lyn Hejinian, your Craig Dworkin, your Elizabeth Willis, etc. Find your own cool poets now!

New dataset hot off the press 🚨 This data documents the bestselling authors and titles distributed by Small Press Distribution (SPD) between 2006-2023, including American poetry, short and experimental fiction, & hybrid nonfiction and essay. Check it out! data.post45.org/posts/small-...

Issue 46 of #rdmweekly is out! 📬 ➡️ @post45data.bsky.social Tabular Data Style Guide ➡️ Resources to Meet the NIH Data Sharing Plan Format @marlahertz.bsky.social ➡️ AI-Assisted Data Analysis for Reproducible Research @digiresacademy.bsky.social and more! rdmweekly.substack.com/p/rdm-weekly...

"Make yourself a spreadsheet and folder of .txt files" is how so many projects start. I'm delighted that this style guide exists to point students to -- so many of the little gotchas that I try to remember to mention, and several I often forget about!

Great news for people who read Playboy for the articles

OMG this is SO good

Amazed to note that Fahrenheit 451 was very nearly the FIRST basically new fiction they published, in their FOURTH EVER issue; in their previous three issues, most of their fiction was reprints of Sherlock Holmes stories or excerpts from the Decameron

The people who just read PLAYBOY for the articles ended up encountering some of the finest American writers of the 20th century. Now, thanks to Nora Shaalan and the Post45 Data Collective, we have a record of the more than 1,000 stories published by PLAYBOY from 1953 to 2020!

Who wrote fiction for Playboy? Now you know!

We're excited to share a new dataset, The Playboy Fiction Index, by Nora Shaalan. It includes metadata for +1,000 works of fiction that appeared in Playboy between 1953-2020—featuring authors like Joyce Carol Oates, Nabokov, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, and more. data.post45.org/posts/playbo...

It's kind of amazing that Juliana Spahr, who, with her collaborators Claire Grossman and Stephanie Young, has done more than anyone else to gather data on and analyze literary prizes, has won a Pulitzer www.pulitzer.org/winners/juli...

Here's her peer-reviewed, published dataset of Major Literary Prizes at @post45data.bsky.social data.post45.org/posts/the-in...

Please consider voting for us for Best DH Resource 2025! And while you're at, cast a vote for Grant Wythoff and @teddyleane.bsky.social's _Time Horizons of Futuristic Fiction_ in the category of Best Dataset! So many awesome projects—and anyone can vote.

We are very grateful that J.D. served as one of our faculty respondents at the inaugural Post45 Data Collective Grad Workshop. It was wonderful to gather with such bright young scholars and to see all the creative research they're doing with, against, and alongside cultural data.

Just got out of the first ever @post45data.bsky.social grad workshop. Fantastic projects drawing and testing the limits of the literary and cultural data sets. You can find the peer-reviewed sets at the link: use them, critique them, submit new ones. data.post45.org

👋 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

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

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. 😵‍💫

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.

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...

"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...

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!!

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/...

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-...

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.

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/...

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