Alan Liu

Selected UCSB English Department Small-Team Projects

• Web Pages & Database-to-Web Sites (“Web 1.0” and “Web 1.5”)
  • Voice of the Shuttle (1994-2001) (2001-present)
  • Transcriptions Project
  • The Romantic Chronology (co-editor Laura Mandell; original version 1995-96; database version 1999)
  • English Dept. Site
  • Coursebuilder
• Blogs and Wikis (Web 2.0)
  • The Agrippa Files (co-built with graduate students)
  • EDKB-Wiki
• Immersive Virtual Environments
  • Second Life Instructional Project (co-developed with Rita Raley and Media Arts & Technology, English, and Sociology graduate students)

Institutional Implications: UCSB English Department’s “Center” Model

• Transcriptions: Literature and the Culture of Information
  • Literature & Culture of Information Undergraduate (LCI) Specialization

  

• Early Modern Center
• American Cultures & Global Contexts
• Literature and the Environment
• Literature and the Mind

Some (Tentative) Principles of Small-Team Projects

• Team model + POST method (Forrester Research group on POST)
• • Team-first versus project-first philosophy (i.e., the difference between the academy and business)
  • Differentiation of skills/tasks
  • Parity of interests and intellectual engagement in project (“mindshare” problem)
  • Simultaneous work tracks (i.e., avoid “engineer-first” project design)
  • Project collaboration logistics:
    • hands-on supervision
    • lead research assistant
    • weekly face-to-face meetings
    • content-management-system as staging ground for work (or equivalent: blogs, wikis, Google Docs, etc.)

Selected UCSB/UC Large Collaborative Projects

• Digital Culture Project (director: William Warner; 2000-2005)
• English Broadside Ballad Archive (director: Patricia Fumerton, 2006-)
• Transliteracies Project: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading (2005-2010)

Some Problems of Large, Distributed Projects

• Normal humanities large-scale formats for working and sharing interim results not fully useful (e.g., conferences, editions)
  • Cost and logistics issues
  • Not collaborative-goal oriented
• Need to scale modularly into multiple small-team groups (e.g., Transliteracies research working groups
• Need to cross between disciplines
  • “What’s that for?” (Kevin Almeroth)
  • My “Literature+” courses English 149 | English 236 (supporting Toy Chest (Online or Downloadable Tools for Building Projects))
  • Transliteracies Social Computing Group
• Need to bridge across multiple geographical locations
  • Small-scale face-to-face workshops
  • Remote meetings
  • Asynchronous use of video/audio recordings
  • Staff-to-staff financial coordination / group and task-oriented budget reporting