Michael Falk

Michael Falk is Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies at the University of Melbourne, a Chief Investigator on the wikihistories project and runs the research project Homo Calculans: The Computerisation of the Human Sciences, 1950s-1960s. Additionally, he convenes the Anticodians, a Critical Code Studies reading group based in the antipodes.

Falk is a literary scholar by training, and a programmer by fascination. He connects these two sides of his work in two ways: firstly, by using computation to unweave literary texts, and discover beautiful patterns in their words; and secondly, by using literature to unweave computation, drawing on the rich resources of literary tradition to understand the nature and role of software.

Falk’s recent book Romanticism and the Contingent Self (2024) explores what it meant to ‘have no self’ in Romantic literature. By using innovative digital techniques such as text analysis, sentiment mining and network analysis, he reveals how a whole host of Romantic writers questioned the very existence of the self. Falk is currently writing The Robots are Coming!, a book on the theme of his Artspace lecture, as well as a series of scholarly articles critiquing the source code of AI software.