Michael Falk

English and Theatre Studies. University of Melbourne. Naarm. Australia.

prof_pic.jpg

E270 John Medley

University of Melbourne

Parkville VIC 3010

I am Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies at the University of Melbourne, and a Chief Investigator on the wikihistories project. I also run the homo calculans project and convene the anticodians.

I co-ordinate the Digital Studies minor in the Faculty of Arts. I teach students to code. I teach them about the history of computing, and I teach them about the place of the Humanities and Social Sciences in that history.

I am a literary scholar by training, and a programmer by fascination. I connect these two sides of my work in two ways. The first way: I use computation to unweave literary texts, and discover beautiful patterns in their words. The second way: I use literature to unweave computation, drawing on the rich resources of literary tradition to understand the nature and role of software.

In my book Romanticism and the Contingent Self, I explore what it meant to ‘have no self’ in Romantic literature. The Romantics are often seen as the most self-obsessed writers in the history of Western literature. I show how a whole host of Romantic writers questioned the very existence of the self. Charles Harpur, Maria Edgeworth, Thomas Moore, Charlotte Smith, John Clare, Amelia Opie and Joanna Baillie all portray themselves or their characters as monstrosities or multiplicities rather than individuals. To show how they do this, I put their words under the microscope in R and Python.

news

Sep 30, 2025 Registration is now open for Settler Poetry in the Age of Harpur, a 1.5-day symposium at the University of Melbourne. Charles Harpur is one of the most talented and troubling poets of Australia’s early white settlement. Armed with the new editions of his poems and letters, speakers at the conference will explore his troublous works.
Sep 08, 2025 Registration is now open for DHA25. If you can, do join us in Ngambri for the biennial meeting of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities.
Aug 21, 2025 Registration is now open for the Madness in Method workshop, the main event of the homo calculans project. The workshop takes place at the University of Melbourne on September 10, and features keynotes from Prof Kath Bode and Dr Luca Sholz.
Jul 13, 2025 Today we launch the Manifesto for Wikimedia Research. The Manifesto lays out a roadmap for critical scholarship of Wikipedia and its sister projects. Read our blog post for details, or our commentary in Big Data & Society for a deeper dive.
Apr 02, 2025 Call for Papers: The CFP for Digital Humanities Australasia ‘25 is out. Please join us in Ngambri/Canberra from December 2-5 to discuss all things digital and humanistic.

latest posts

Aug 05, 2025 The homo calculans corpus
Jul 30, 2025 Descending further
Jul 29, 2025 The uses of error

selected publications

  1. falk_romanticism_2024.jpg
    Romanticism and the Contingent Self: The Challenge of Representation
    Michael Falk
    May 2024
  2. falk_artificial_2021.jpg
    Artificial stupidity
    Michael Falk
    Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Apr 2021
  3. 2024-title-page-medium.jpeg
    How Australian places are represented on Wikipedia
    Heather Ford, Francesca Sidoti, Michael Falk, and 2 more authors
    Oct 2024
  4. Wikilambda the Ultimate
    Michael Falk
    Apr 2025