Melanie Walsh studies what data does to books — BookTok, library checkout patterns, AI-generated fiction — and is writing one about American authors who went viral. The stack is a 14-inch M3 MacBook Pro, VS Code, increasingly Claude Code, and a book manuscript in Markdown plus Quarto plus Pandoc so it converts to anything. On the desk: a thrift-store UW lava lamp with a Bluetooth speaker in it.