2024 |
“Reframing the Humanities as Useful” (U. Iowa)Categories Upcoming Talks & Events |
“Reframing the Humanities as Useful,” Humanities for the Public Good Closing Symposium: A Celebration, Obermann Center, University of Iowa, 1 March 2024.
2024 |
“Reframing the Humanities as Useful” (U. Iowa)Categories Upcoming Talks & Events |
“Reframing the Humanities as Useful,” Humanities for the Public Good Closing Symposium: A Celebration, Obermann Center, University of Iowa, 1 March 2024.
2024 |
“Toward New MLA Guidelines on Evaluating Digital Scholarship” (MLA 2024, Philadelphia)Categories Talks |
“Toward New MLA Guidelines on Evalutatiing Digital Scholarship,” session 404 on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship Today: Problems and Solutions” organized by the MLA Committee on Information Technology, MLA 2024, Philadelphia, 6 January 2024.
2023 |
“Messages and Values in the Age of Machine Learning: From Postcards to Social Media”Categories Essays |
Citation: Alan Liu, “Messages and Values ??in the Age of Machine Learning: From Postcards to Social Media,” Prace Kulturoznawcze 26, no. 4 (2023): 125–29, https://doi.org/10.19195/0860-6668.26.4.8.
2023 |
“Where Does Data Science Fit in a Liberal Arts Academy” (Stanford U.)Categories Talks |
“Where Does Data Science Fit in a Liberal Arts Academy?”, seminar on “The Place of Data” (part of the Stanford CESTA/Mellon Sawyer Seminar series on “The Data that Divides Us: Recalibrating Data Methods for New Knowledge Frameworks Across the Humanities”)Stanford University, 2 November 2023.
2023 |
“Toward a Center for Humanities Communication” (National Humanities Conference, Indianapolis)Categories Talks |
“Toward a Center for Humanities Communication,” session on “How to Communicate Your Humanities Scholarship to the Public,” National Humanities Conference, Indianapolis, 26 Octobeer 2023.
2023 |
“Reframing the Humanities as Useful” (National Humanities Conference, Indianapolis)Categories Talks |
“Reframing the Humanities as Useful,” session on “From Thinking to Doing: Making the Humanities Public,” National Humanities Conference, Indianapolis, 26 October 2023.
2023 |
“What is Good Writing in the Age of ChatGPT?” (UC Santa Barbara)Categories Blog Essays |
“What is Good Writing in the Age of ChatGPT?”, speech for English Department commencement ceremony, 18 June 2023.
That’s the question I call on you as graduating English majors to help society answer as you bring your skills in writing and speaking well — and in knowing well through language and its literatures — into the world….
2023 |
“What is Good Writing in the Age of ChatGPT?” (UC Santa Barbara)Categories Talks |
“What is Good Writing in the Age of ChatGPT?”, speech for English Department commencement ceremony, 18 June 2023.
That’s the question I call on you as graduating English majors to help society answer as you bring your skills in writing and speaking well — and in knowing well through language and its literatures — into the world….
2023 |
“Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) and the Sociology of New Media” (Oxford U.)Categories Talks |
“Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) and the Sociology of New Media,” virtual presentation at the Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), Oxford U., 18 May 2023.
2023 |
“Reframing the Use of the Humanities” (Amercian Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2023)Categories Talks |
“Reframing the Use of the Humanities,” Panel on “Can the Humanities Be ‘Useful’” at the Symposium on 10th-Year Annersary of The Heart of the Matter Report, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Cambridge, MA, 2 April 2023.
2023 |
“Infrastructure as Epistemic Value in the Digital Humanities” (German Institute for Japanese Studies, Tokyo, 2023)Categories Talks |
“Infrastructure as Epistemic Value in the Digital Humanities,” Symposium on “The Integrative Potential of Epistemic Virtues for the Digital Humanities,” German Institute for Japanese Studies, Tokyo, 27 January 2023.
2023 |
“Thinking at the ‘Enterprise Technology Systems’ Level” (MLA Convention, San Francisco, 2023)Categories Talks |
“Thinking at the ‘Enterprise Technology Systems’ Level.” Panel on What Do We Want In A Research Platform Of The Future? (session 620), Modern Language Association convention, San Francisco, 7 January 2023.
2023 |
“Research Learning: Digital Project Courses & Teaching Research Practices” (MLA Convention, San Francisco, 2023)Categories Talks |
“Research Learning: Digital Project Courses & Teaching Research Practices.” Panel on From Pedagogy to Research and Back Again (session 432), Modern Language Association convention, San Francisco, 7 January 2023.
2022 |
“Theses on Large Language Models and ‘Good’ Writing”Categories Blog Essays |
Citation: “Theses on Large Language Models and ‘Good’ Writing” Alan Liu, 4 December 2022. doi:
The following was originally posted on Mastodon on December 3, 2022, in a series of eight posts (beginning at https://fosstodon.org/@ayliu/109451839640202878). In assembling the thread together here I have added a few links.
4 December 2022
1/8 As an English professor working in the digital humanities, my takeaway from ChatGPT (& large-language-model discourse generators in general) is that society will soon need to decide which values associated with “good” writing can and will be offloaded to LLMs so that the value added by humans can be shifted to a smaller or restructured spectrum of the functions of “good” writing for which humans can be recognized, rewarded, and held responsible.
2022 |
“WhatEvery1Says: The Humanities in Public Discourse” (UCSB)Categories Talks |
“WhatEvery1Says: The Humanities in Public Discourse.” Humanities & Fine Arts Digital Humanities Showcase, UC Santa Barbara, 18 November 2022.
2022 |
“WhatEvery1Says: The Humanities in Public Discourse” (National Humanities Conference, Los Angeles))Categories Talks |
“WhatEvery1Says: The Humanities in Public Discourse.” Panel on “The Public, the Humanities, and the Public Humanities” at the National Humanities Conference 2022, Los Angeles, 12 November 2022.
2021 |
“Research-based Humanities Advocacy: 4Humanities.org and the WhatEvery1Says Project” (Goethe University, Frankfurt)Categories Talks |
“Research-based Humanities Advocacy: 4Humanities.org and the WhatEvery1Says Project” Talk for 25Humans For the Humanities, hosted virtually by Goethe University, Frankfurt, 14 December 2021.
2021 |
“Where Does Data Science Fit in a Liberal Arts University?” (UCSB)Categories Talks |
“Where Does Data Science Fit in a Liberal Arts University?” Data Science Summit, UCSB, 3 December 2021.
2021 |
“What Everyone Says About the Humanities: The Challenge Posed by the Public Perception of the Humanities in the Media” (Daedalus Authors’ Meeting)Categories Talks |
“What Everyone Says About the Humanities: The Challenge Posed by the Public Perception of the Humanities in the Media.” Daedalus authors’ meeting for contributors to special issue on “The Humanities in American Life,” 10 Sept. 2021 (conducted over Zoom).
2021 |
“Digital Humanities and Critical Infrastructure Studies — An Overview” (King’s College, London)Categories Talks |
“Digital Humanities and Critical Infrastructure Studies — An Overview.” King’s College, London, 21 June 2021, 5:10-5:50 pm London time. Keynote lecture for the “Infrastructural Interventions” workshop in the Digital Humanities & Critical Infrastructure Studies series organized by Urszula Pawlicka-Deger. (Delivered by Microsoft Teams meeting.)
2021 |
“WhatEvery1Says: Data Mining Media Coverage of the Humanities” (The Education University of Hong Kong)Categories Talks |
“WhatEvery1Says: Data Mining Media Coverage of the Humanities.” The Education University of Hong Kong, 8 April 2021.
2021 |
“WhatEvery1Says: Data Mining Media Coverage of the Humanities” (UC Merced)Categories Talks |
“WhatEvery1Says: Data Mining Media Coverage of the Humanities.” Digital Tools for Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Workshop Series, Public Humanities Design Studio, University of California, Merced, 15 March 2021.
2021 |
“Writing Data: Literary Scholars and New Forms of Public Writing” (MLA Convention, 2021)Categories Talks |
“Writing Data: Literary Scholars and New Forms of Public Writing.” Panel on “Public Humanities in the Age of Precarity, Modern Language Association convention (virtually presented panel), 7 January 2021.
2020 |
“Critical Infrastructure Studies — A Primer” (Furman U.)Categories Talks |
“Critical Infrastructure Studies — A Primer.” Furman University, 12 November 2020, 1:30-2:30 pm Pacific time (4:30-5:30 Eastern time). (Lecture delivered by Zoom webinar: registration.)
2020 |
“Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age — A Virtual Talk” (UCSB History Dept.)Categories Audio/Video , Talks |
“Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age — A Virtual Talk.” History Department, U. California, Santa Barbara (4 May 2020, 11:00 AM-12:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time) (Zoom meeting information sent after request through this form.)
2020 |
“Data Moves: Libraries and Data Science Workflows”Categories Essays |
Citation:”Data Moves: Libraries and Data Science Workflows.” Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age. Ed. Susan Mizruchi. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020: 211-219.
2020 |
“Humans in the Loop: Humanities Hermeneutics and Machine Learning.” (DHd2020 Conference)Categories Audio/Video , Talks |
“Humans in the Loop: Humanities Hermeneutics and Machine Learning.” Keynote for DHd2020 (7th Annual Conference of the German Society for Digital Humanities), University of Paderborn, 6 March 2020.
2020 |
“The WhatEvery1Says (WE1S) Project” (Mellon Research Forum)Categories Talks |
“The WhatEvery1Says (WE1S) Project.” Mellon Research Forum Convening, University of California, Irvine, January 31, 2020.
2020 |
“Toward a Diversity Stack: Digital Humanities and Diversity as Technical Problem”Categories Essays |
Citation:“Toward a Diversity Stack: Digital Humanities and Diversity as Technical Problem.” PMLA 135.1 (2020): 130-151.
2019 |
“Dialogue between Alan Liu, Tim Hitchcock, and Jessica Otis” (German Historical Institute)Categories Talks |
“Dialogue between Alan Liu (UC Santa Barbara), Tim Hitchcock (U. Sussex), and Jessica Otis (George Mason U.).” Fourth Annual Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History at the German Historical Institute. Washington, D.C., 12 October 2019.
2019 |
“Critical Infrastructure Studies — A Primer” (U. Texas at Austin)Categories Talks |
“Critical Infrastructure Studies — A Primer.” University of Texas at Austin, 4 September 2019.
2019 |
“What Infrastructure Assumes: Digital Humanities and Critical Infrastructure Studies” (U. Guelph)Categories Talks |
“What Infrastructure Assumes: Digital Humanities and Critical Infrastructure Studies.” U. Guelph, 7 March 2019.
2019 |
“Digital Humanities Learning Goals for Undergraduates” (U. Colorado, Boulder)Categories Talks |
“Digital Humanities Learning Goals for Undergraduates.” U. Colorado, Boulder, 22 February 2019.
2019 |
“What Infrastructure Assumes: Digital Humanities and Critical Infrastructure Studies” (CUNY Graduate Center)Categories Talks |
“What Infrastructure Assumes: Digital Humanities and Critical Infrastructure Studies.” The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), 15 February 2019.
2019 |
“Critical Infrastructure Studies — A Primer” (Rice U.)Categories Talks |
“Critical Infrastructure Studies — A Primer.” Initial talk of a pair of presentations by Alan Liu and James Smithies. Humanities Research Center, Rice University, 24 January 2019.
2019 |
“The WhatEvery1Says Project — An Overview” (U. Miami)Categories Talks |
“The WhatEvery1Says Project — An Overview.” Panel on the WhatEvery1Says Project, U. Miami, 17 January, 2019.
2018 |
Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital AgeCategories Books |
Citation: Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
[336 pages, 49 halftones, ISBN paperback: 9780226451954; E-book: 9780226452005]
Companion video (talk by Alan Liu on the book) (recorded 4 May 2020; 47 min.) |
2018 |
“Open and Reproducible Workflows for the Digital Humanities–A 35,000-foot Elevation View” (U. Iowa)Categories Talks |
“Open and Reproducible Workflows for the Digital Humanities–A 35,000-foot Elevation View.” Keynote at the Digital Bridges Symposium (Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry project), University of Iowa and Grinnell College, 10 August 2018.
2018 |
“Critical Infrastructure, Past and Present” (NASSR 2018)Categories Talks |
“Romanticism and Critical Infrastructure Studies.” Introduction to seminar co-led with Jacques Khalip on “Romanticism and Critical Infrastructural Studies.” NASSR 2018, Brown University, 22 June 2018.
2018 |
Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age (Catalogue Copy, Table of Contents, Abstracts)Categories Uncategorized |
Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018 (forthcoming November 2018).
Can today’s society, increasingly captivated by a constant flow of information, share a sense of history? How did our media-making forebears balance the tension between the present and the absent, the individual and the collective, the static and the dynamic—and how do our current digital networks disrupt these same balances? Can our social media, with its fleeting nature, even be considered social at all?
In Friending the Past, Alan Liu proposes fresh answers to these innovative questions of connection. He explores how we can learn from the relationship between past societies whose media forms fostered a communal and self-aware sense of history—such as prehistorical oral societies with robust storytelling cultures, or the great print works of nineteenth-century historicism—and our own instantaneous present. He concludes with a surprising look at how the sense of history exemplified in today’s JavaScript timelines compares to the temporality found in Romantic poetry.
Interlaced among these inquiries, Liu shows how extensive “network archaeologies” can be constructed as novel ways of thinking about our affiliations with time and with each other. These conceptual architectures of period and age are also always media structures, scaffolded with the outlines of what we mean by history. Thinking about our own time, Liu wonders if the digital, networked future can sustain a similar sense of history.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction (abstract)1 Friending the Past (abstract)2 Imagining the New Media Encounter (abstract)3 When Was Linearity? (abstract)4 Remembering Networks (abstract)5 Like a Sense of History (abstract)Appendix: Hypothetical Machine-Learning Workflow for Studying the Sense of History |
Friending the Past asks if today’s society, increasingly captivated by up-to-the-minute information media, can have a sense of history. What is the relation between past societies whose media forms fostered a communal or self-aware sense of history—for example, storytelling in prehistorical oral societies, or the great print works of historicism in the nineteenth century—and today’s “instant” networked information society? How did the sense of history once balance between the feeling for the present and for the absent, the temporal and the social, the individual and the collective, and the static and the dynamic? And how do digital networks now change the balance? Blending the approaches of intellectual history, media studies, and digital humanities, the book proposes novel ways of thinking about the evolving sense of history. Topics include the relation between high-print historicism and social networking; narratives of “new media encounters” between societies; graphically visualized and conceptualized understandings of history; and “network archaeology” as the variant of media archaeology needed to grasp the networked texture of our contemporary feeling for history. At its close, the book calls the question: is there a sense of history in the digital, networked age? The book concludes with an example of what a digitally networked sense of history can be by examining (in a manner poised between “close reading” and “distant reading”) the code of one of today’s JavaScript “timelines” and comparing it to the experience of temporality encoded in William Wordsworth’s poetry during the era of romanticism.
Book Keywords:
digital humanities, historicism, history, information society, media, media archaeology, networks, romanticism, temporality, timelines
Written fictionally in the voice of today’s “sense of history,” the introduction frames the central question of the book: in the age of digital media, digital networks, social networking, and data, can society have a sense of history comparable to that which characterized earlier eras of history and media? Speaking like a chorus in a Greek tragedy, the Sense of History speaks in character to reframe the problem as the transition from an older, interconnected circuit of meaning-making acts—”rhetoric representation interpretation”—to a later one: “communication information media.”
Chapter Keywords: communication, data, digital, information, interpretation, media, networks, representation, rhetoric, sense of history
Chapter 1 studies the change from prior senses of history to today’s “real time” sense of history—or instant sense of community—of social networks. How was the equivalent of a sense of history experienced, and mediated, in prehistorical oral cultures? How did print culture at the height of the history of the book, which coincided with narrative historicism in the mode of Leopold von Ranke (Historismus), alter the sense of history? And how do “Web 2.0” and social networking today yet again change the sense of history? Can today’s society “friend” past ones to imagine, and absorb, prior senses of history as a layered, enrichening texture of the present? What continuities—for example, of Internet transmissions following the routes once forced by imperial roads across conquered lands—lock the digital present to its historical past? But, also, what discontinuities allow past historicism and today’s information empire to challenge each other’s assumptions, thus enabling a more humane texture of the present mindful of the past?
Chapter Keywords: historicism, Historismus, history of the book, Leopold von Ranke, media determinism, narrative, oral culture, print culture, social networking, web 2.0
This chapter studies “narratives of new media encounter” (accounts of how individuals and societies react to the introduction of writing, radio, television, the Internet, Web 2.0, and so on) to suggest that major historical changes in the sociocultural order are mirrored in narratives of media history. Often, as in the case of Marshall McLuhan’s writings, such narratives follow a plot of progressivist media determinism—of necessary change from old media to new media—even as they also reveal the more ambivalent experience of a “contact zone” between civilizations. At once descriptive and interpretive, tales of new media encounter are a foundational form of media theory—a kind of media archaeology of media theory. They show how societies experience history as communication and information media, and communication and information media as history. They register the experience of history as media history. Finishing on the promising example of a recent collection of essays on the digital humanities, the chapter concludes by asking the critical question: what is an imaginatively enrichening rather than determinist and constraining narrative of new media encounter?
Chapter Keywords: contact zone, digital humanities, Marshall McLuhan, media archaeology, media determinism, media history, media theory, narrative, new media, old media,
Linearists, as they might be called, have staked deep claims of cultural and other value on the linear exposition of history, narrative, argument, and other forms of thought. Theorists of networks, hypertext, and other domains of today’s digital era stake equally significant claims on the nonlinear, often represented emblematically in network-style or other postlinear graphical visualizations. Indeed, they often elevate the importance of graphical knowledge in general. Informed by media history extending from oral culture and the history of the book to digital new media, this chapter asks the simplifying question: what if there never was any linearity to defend or to contest? What if the idea of linearity has always been an ideology deployed through graphical knowledge systems that are realized in graphics as the visualization of any era’s idea of authoritative linearity—for example, who gets to go to the front of a line and why—and ultimately of its sense of history? The chapter makes Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” (with its invocation of “meaningless plungings” yet also visualization of seas “portioned” into fixed “emblazoned zones”) a recurrent poetic touchstone of its argument–in part by using digital humanities text analysis methods to render the poem as visualizations.
Chapter Keywords: digital humanities, graphics, history of the book, ideology, linearity, media history, networks, oral culture, Wallace Stevens, visualization
Chapter 4 begins on the paradigmatic instance of a hybrid print/digital work at the onset of the digital networked era—Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) by Dennis Ashbaugh, Kevin Begos, Jr., and William Gibson (1992)—to call for a method of “network archaeology” extending media archaeology. Network archaeology facilitates understanding the sense of history in our postlinear age of digital networks filled with buzzing, flitting ephemeral and dynamic artifacts making a mockery of archiving yet urgently requiring methods not just of archiving but of open, transparent archiving. Past eras created networked artifacts and systems in their own way. The chapter braids together research on web archiving, scientific workflows (data-analysis workflows facilitating reproducible research), data provenance, and digital humanities prosopography to make the case for remembering networks through new digital archiving methods. Remembering networks, it argues, is foundational for providing our networked age with its appropriate, distinctive sense of history.
Chapter Keywords: Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), media archaeology, network archaeology, networks, prosopography, provenance, reproducible research, scientific workflows, web archiving, William Gibson
This concluding chapter defines the sense of history of any era or culture as a set of parameters—ontological, epistemological, socio-historical, and others—that can be studied through a combination of close reading and digital humanities distant reading. Splitting the difference between close and distant reading, the chapter studies visualized “timelines” as a traditional mode of distant reading history (analyzing and visualizing long vistas of historical event). Then, to define the sense of history specific to the internet age, it “close reads” at the code level an influential contemporary form of history: digital timelines. Focusing on the genre of JavaScript digital timelines, which dynamically draw data from backend sources to populate the “document object model” (DOM) of web-based timelines in frontend interfaces, the chapter postulates that the digital era is characterized by its own sense of history—one attuned to the contingency of networks. Setting this contingent sense of history in relief against that of an earlier era, the chapter ends by comparing the TimelineJS Javascript timeline in particular to the time sense, and implicit timelines, in William Wordsworth’s poetry and romanticism. Code meets poetry at a junction between the internet era and the humanities.
Chapter Keywords: close reading, contingency, digital humanities, distant reading, JavaScript, networks, romanticism, sense of history, timelines, William Wordsworth