Alan Liu

“RoSE (Research-oriented Social Environment).” Compatible Data Initiative meeting, New York City. 24 September 2011. (Talk presented via Skype.)

“Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” (50-minute version). University of Nottingham. 5 July 2011.

“Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” (30-minute version). Digital Literacies panel. The Future University conference. Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge University. 2 July 2011.

• Video of talk

“4Humanities: The Digital Humanities Community & Humanities Advocacy.” Luncheon address at centerNet General Business Meeting, Digital Humanities 2011 conference, Stanford, 22 June 2011.

• DH 2011 Web site
• Twitter archives of conference: 1 | 2

First page

Citation: “We Will Really Know.” Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and Arts. Ed. Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 89-94.

“This is Not a Book: Long Forms of Shared Attention in the Digital Age.” Panel on “What is a Book?”, Unbound Book Conference, Central Library, Amsterdam, and Royal Library, The Hague. 20 May 2011.

• Video of talk
• 
• Conference site
• Conference Photostream
• Photos of panel on “What is a Book?”: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

“Cultural Criticism and the Digital Humanities: Alan Liu.” Interview by Janneke Adema for Culture Machine. 19 May 2011. Amsterdam.

• Audio interview (16:50 min.)

“Introduction to Research Slam.” English Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. 13 May 2011.

• HUMlab, Umeå University, Sweden
• Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) (and Digital Cultures & Creativity Honors Program)
• Writers House at Rutgers University: Homepage | Photos from site visit
• University of Washington DUB (Design Use Build) Program in Human-Computer Interaction and Design
  • Axel Roesler

  Images for Intro

  
  

Workshop with Alan Liu, Patrik Svensson, and Whitney Trettien. HUMlab, Umeå University, Sweden. 10 May 2011.

Essays and sites for workshop:
• Alan Liu, “The State of the Digital Humanities: A Report and a Critique” (manuscript of forthcoming article)
• Alan Liu, “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”
• 4Humanities
• Patrik Svensonn, “The Digital Humanities as a Humanities Project” (manuscript of forthcoming article)

“Close, Distant, and Unexpected Reading: New Forms of Literary Reading in the Digital Age.” HUMlab, Umeå University, Sweden. 10 May 2011.

• Video of talk

“Friending the Past: The Sense of History and Social Computing.” California State University, Los Angeles. 2 May, 2011.

URL: https://4humanities.org/
Role: Co-founder and coordinator (with Geoffrey Rockwell and Melissa Terras).
4Humanities is a site created by the international community of digital humanities scholars and educators to assist in advocacy for the humanities. As a platform, 4Humanities stages the efforts of humanities advocates to reach out to the public. It solicits well-reasoned or creative demonstrations, examples, testimonials, arguments, opinion pieces, open letters, press releases, print posters, video “advertisements,” write-in campaigns, social-media campaigns, short films, and other innovative forms of humanities advocacy, along with accessibly-written scholarly works grounding the whole in research or reflection about the state of the humanities. As a resource, 4Humanities provides humanities advocates with a stockpile of digital tools, collaboration methods, royalty-free designs and images, best practices, new-media expertise, and customizable newsfeeds of issues and events relevant to the state of the humanities in any local or national context. (Also see 4Humanities local chapters, including the 4Humanities@UCSB local chapter, co-directors Claudio Fogu and Alan Liu.)

URL: http://rose.english.ucsb.edu [guest login available; active login by request]
Role: Project Lead.
White Paper for NEH: “Friending the Humanities Knowledge Base: Exploring Bibliography as Social Network in RoSE” (PDF)

Created in its first stage as an outcome of the Transliteracies Project, RoSE completed a second stage of development under a NEH Digital Humanities Start-up Grant (Level II) [Grant number: HD-51433-11]. RoSE is a Web-based knowledge-exploration system that fuses a social-computing model to humanities bibliographical resources to allow users to explore the present and past of the human record as one “social network.” Stocked with initial information data-mined from YAGO and Project Gutenberg (with plans for data-mining the SNAC Project), RoSE provides profile pages about persons and documents, keywords and other data, and visualizations that help users see the relationships between people and documents. Uniquely, it also allows users (humanities students, scholars, and research groups) to add “thickly described” metadata on top of standard bibliographical data. This facilitates a social-network-like sense of active, dynamic interrelation with the objects of research.

• RoSE site (guest login available; active login by request)
• Press Release on RoSE, 11 January 2012, UCSB Office of Public Affairs Press (includes video interview with Alan Liu)
• White Paper for NEH

“The Rebound Book: What Binds a Book Together in the Digital Age?” Workshop on Emerging Configurations of the Virtual and the Real, Chicago (hosted by School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh). 20 March 2011.

• Conference Web site, with slide presentations (login required)

“The University in the Digital Age: The Big Questions.” Texas Institute of Literary and Textual Studies symposium on “Digital Humanities: Teaching and Learning.” University of Texas, Austin. 10 March 2011. (Talk presented via Skype.)

• Video of talk

Pedagogy Session: “A Digital Approach to Collaborating Across Disciplines: Literature+”. Conference on “Literature, Creativity, and Print Culture: Sustainability in a Digital Age” (7th Annual Undergraduate Literature and Creative Writing Conference). Susquehanna University. 21 February 2011.

• Notes and Links for Session Introduction

“Close, Distant, and Unexpected Reading: New Forms of Literary Reading in the Digital Age.” Conference on “Literature, Creativity, and Print Culture: Sustainability in a Digital Age” (7th Annual Undergraduate Literature and Creative Writing Conference). Susquehanna University. 21 February 2011.

“Toward a Larger Vision of Digital Instruction: Critical Reflections on the UC Online Instruction Pilot Project.” Faculty Forum on “Is Online Education the Answer?” Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, University of California, Santa Barbara. 13 January 2011.

• Description of IHC Faculty Forum on “Is Online Education the Answer?”
• UC Online Instruction Pilot Project

“Close, Distant, and Unexpected Readings.” Panel on “So Close and Yet So Far: Close Reading and Sociology.” Modern Language Association convention. Los Angeles. 9 January 2011.

Citation: “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” Alan Liu, 7 January 2011. https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/where-is-cultural-criticism-in-the-digital-humanities/

“Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” Panel on “The History and Future of the Digital Humanities.” Modern Language Association convention. Los Angeles. 7 January 2011.

• Full text of original talk (delivered in truncated, improvised from during the panel due to time constraints)

“From Reading to Social Computing.” Department of English, University of Maryland, College Park. 5 October 2010.

“Rerouting Creativity: New Media Arts after the Ideology of Creativity.” Arts and Humanities Dean’s Lecture Series, University of Maryland, College Park. 4 October 2010.

Workshop on “When Was Linearity? What Graphics Mean in the Digital Age.” Center for the Arts in Society, Carnegie Mellon University. 17 September 2010.

• Reading for workshop

“Remembering Networks: Agrippa, RoSE, and Network Archaeology.” Center for the Arts in Society, Carnegie Mellon University. 16 September 2010.

• Abstract: In 1992, at the onset of the digitally networked aged, publisher Kevin Begos, Jr., artist Dennis Ashbaugh, and novelist William Gibson issued their collaborative artist book Agrippa (a book of the dead), whose last pages contained a self-encrypting, “vanishing” poem on a diskette. The poem immediately went viral on the networks and clinched Agrippa’s status as a prototypical networked book or “book that became a network.” Basing his talk on Agrippa as well as on The Agrippa Files site that he and graduate students built to document the book’s media and contexts, Alan Liu speculates on how a “network archaeology” might be possible that extends the scholarly approaches of “media archaeology” and “the history of the book” to past works that are networked. Liu will conclude with a presentation of the RoSE (Research-oriented Social Environment) online system that the Transliteracies Project he directs created to capture networks of past writers, readers, and works through present social-network technologies.

Interview by David Miller, Director, Center for Digital Humanities, University of South Carolina. 10 September 2010.

• Video interview (56 min.)

“From Reading to Social Computing.” Center for Digital Humanities, University of South Carolina. 9 September 2010.

• Video of talk
• Video interview of Alan Liu by David Miller, Director of Center for Digital Humanities

“Literature and Social Mapping: From Reading to Social Computing.” University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 26 August 2010.

Workshop on “Escaping History: The New Historicism, Databases, and Contingency” (chap. 9 of Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database). University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 26 August 2010.

“Against the Monotony of Singularity: Humanities Institutions and Collective Intelligence.” Roundtable on “Collective Intelligence or Silicon Cage?: Digital Culture in the Twenty-First Century – A Bilingual Dialogue between Alan Liu and Pierre Lévy.” Society for Digital Humanities 2010 Conference. Montreal. 2 June 2010.

• Pierre Lévy’s untitled opening statement
  (full text in English with slides; delivered informally in French at the event)
• Alan Liu’s opening statement, “Against the Monotony of Singularity: Humanities Institutions and Collective Intelligence”
  (full text as .doc; slides below) (larger slides in separate window)

“From Reading to Social Computing.” Workshop in the Stanford U., Mills C., UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz “What is a Reader?” project. Stanford University. 21 May 2010.

“RoSE (Research-oriented Social Environment).” Media Arts & Technology 595M Seminar Series. University of California, Santa Barbara. 17 May 2010.

• Abstract for talk
• Slides for talk

“From Reading to Social Computing.” Keynote address. Northeast Modern Language Association convention. Montreal. 9 April 2010.

“Friending the Past: The Sense of History and Social Computing.” Maxwell Cummings Distinguished Lecture. McGill University. 8 April 2010.

“From Reading to Social Computing.” University of Kansas, Lawrence. 8 March 2010.

“RoSE (Research-oriented Social Environment).” Transliteracies Project Design Charrette. University of California, Santa Barbara. 16 February 2010.

• Slides for talk

Citation: “The End of the End of the Book: Dead Books, Lively Margins, and Social Computing.” Michigan Quarterly Review, 48 (2009): 499-520. Special issue on “Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age”

• Full-text online version

“The Future of Graduate Education.” Panel on the Future of Graduate Education. Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, University of California, Santa Barbara. 29 October 2009.

• Presentation slides: .pptx | .ppt | .pdf

Citation: “Thinking Destruction: Creativity, Rational Choice, Emergence, and Destruction Theory.” Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, 1.1 (October 15, 2009). https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/publications/occasion/rational-choice-theory-and-humanities/thinking-destruction-creativity

Citation: “A New Metaphor for Reading.” Invited contribution to “Room for Debate” forum on “Does the Brain Like E-Books?” New York Times, 14 October 2009. http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/does-the-brain-like-e-books/