Announcing Two New Co-Editors—And Saying Goodbye to Dan

Abstract

We are excited to announce that Alexander Manshel and J.D. Porter will be joining Melanie Walsh as co-editors of the Post45 Data Collective.

Figure 1: The image from Dan’s great LARB essay “Fuck the Poetry Police”. Durenstein! by John Bingley Garland.

We are very excited to announce that Alexander Manshel and J.D. Porter will be joining me (Melanie Walsh) as co-editors of the Post45 Data Collective.

Alexander is an Associate Professor in the English Department at McGill University, and J.D. is a Digital Humanities Specialist at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania. Between them, they bring a wealth of knowledge about 20th and 21st century literature, digital humanities, and data science—as well as extensive experience curating and publishing cultural data (see Alexander’s NEA fellowship dataset).

This transition also means that Dan Sinykin—who founded the Post45 Data Collective with Laura McGrath in 2021 and has led the Collective since then—will be stepping back to the Editorial Board. This project would not what it is today without Dan’s ambition, vision, fastidious email communication, and hilarious social media game.

In his fantastic L.A. Review of Books piece, “Fuck the Poetry Police,” Dan laid out a dream for this project:

The idealistic aspiration of the Post45 Data Collective…is a total map of the cultural industries. Imagine if we could link the “Major Literary Prizes” dataset with the agents who represented the winning books, the editors who edited them, the houses that published them, and the venues that reviewed them. Imagine if we could do something similar with film, TV, music, video games, and the parent companies that own them. We could lay bare the mechanisms that maintain hierarchies across the arts. A total map would do more than sociological work: it would transform our interpretations.

We’ve made great strides toward mapping the cultural industries under Dan’s leadership. With our new tripartite editorial crew, we will continue on this journey. We’re planning to bring you even more exciting datasets, data essays, tools, visualizations, and big ideas. Stay tuned! And thanks for everything, Dan!