| 2009 |
“Strange Bookshelves” (University of California, Irvine)Categories Audio/Video , Talks
|
“Strange Bookshelves.” Panel on “Humanities and Technology: The Past Ten Years, The Next Ten Years.” HumaniTech. University of California, Irvine. 19 May 2009.
| 2009 |
“The End of the End of the Book: Dead Books, Lively Margins, and Social Computing” (U. Michigan, Ann Arbor)Categories Talks
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“The End of the End of the Book: Dead Books, Lively Margins, and Social Computing.” Conference on “Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age.” University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 15 May 2009. (Photos of campus and event)
| 2009 |
“Literature+” (U. Washington)Categories Talks
|
“Literature+” Simpson Center. University of Washington, Seattle. 8 May 2009.
This talk/seminar focuses on how digital technologies now bring the core paradigms of research disciplines into close proximity, forcing such uncomfortable questions for the humanities (especially, literature departments) as: “what is ‘interpretation’ for?” or “what is the future of interpretation?”
| 2009 |
“When Was Linearity?: Linear Thought, Graphics, and Freedom in the Age of Knowledge Work” (U. Washington)Categories Talks
|
“When Was Linearity?: Linear Thought, Graphics, and Freedom in the Age of Knowledge Work.” Simpson Center. University of Washington, Seattle. 7 May 2009.
| 2009 |
Notes for Seminar on “Literature+” (Simpson Center, U. Washington)Categories Uncategorized
|
What is the future of “interpretation”?
Department Projects
Department “Center” Model
Collaborative Research or Curricular Development Projects
Interdisciplinary Digital Studies Frameworks at UCSB
Paradigmatic Transdisciplinary Question
Experimental Courses
What is the future of “interpretation”?
Selected Quotations and Concepts
“But within that old territory [of literature], a new object of study: instead of concrete, individual works, a trio of artificial constructs–graphs, maps, and trees–in which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction. ‘Distant reading,’ I have once call this type of approach; where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models” (p. 1).
“By ‘modelling’ I mean the heuristic process of constructing and manipulating models: a ‘model’ I take to be either a representation of something for purposes of study, or a design for realizing something new…. Two effects of computing sharpen the distinction between ‘concept’ on the one hand and the ‘model’ on the other: first, the computational demand for tractability, i.e. for complete explicitness and absolute consistency; second, the manipulability that a digital representation provides…. Take, for example, knowledge one might have of a particular concentration in a deeply familiar work of literature. In modelling one begins by privileging this knowledge, however wrong it might later turn out to be, then building a computational representation of it, e.g. by specifying a structured vocabulary of word-forms in a text-analysis tool. In the initial stages of use, this model would be almost certain to reveal trivial errors of omission and commission. Gradually, however, through perfective iteration trivial error is replaced by meaningful surprise . . . either by a success we cannot explain . . . or by a likewise inexplicable failure” (pp. 24, 25, 25-26)
“The usual object of interpretation is “meaning,” or some set of ideas that can be cast in thematic form. These meanings are sought in different ways: as though resident ‘in’ the work, or evoked through ‘reader-response,’ or deconstructable through a process that would reinstall a structure of intelligibility at a higher, more critical level…. In this paper we want to propose–or recall–another way of engaging imaginative work…. The alternative moves to break beyond conceptual analysis into the kinds of knowledge involved in performative operations–a practice of everyday imaginative life. We will argue that concept-based interpretation, reading along thematic lines, is itself best understood as a particular type of performative and rhetorical operation…. In an undated fragment on a leaf of stationery, Emily Dickinson wrote what appears to be one of her ‘letters to the world’: ‘Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have–a Something overtakes the Mind’ (Prose Fragment 30)…. Our deformations do not flee from the question, or the generation, of ‘meaning.’ Rather, they try to demonstrate–the way one demonstrates how to make something, or do something … that ‘meaning’ in imaginative work is a secondary phenomenon, a kind of meta-data, what Blake called a form of worship ‘Dependent’ upon some primary poetical tale. This point of view explains why, in our deformative maneuvers, interpretive lines of thought spin out of some initial nondiscursive ‘experiment’ with the primary materials. ‘Meaning’ is important not as explanation but as residue. It is what is left behind after the experiment has been run” (pp. 26, 48).
| 2009 |
“Digital Humanities and Academic Change” (Southern Methodist U.)Categories Talks
|
“Digital Humanities and Academic Change.” Gilbert Lecture Series. Southern Methodist University. 16 April 2009.
| 2009 |
“From Reading to Social Computing” (MLA Convention, San Francisco)Categories Talks
|
“From Reading to Social Computing.” Panel on “Methodologies for Literary Studies in the Digital Age.” Modern Language Association convention. San Francisco. 28 December 2008.
(Photos)
| 2009 |
“A Poem Should Be Equal To: / Not True.” Preface to Romanticism, History, Historicism: Essays on an OrthodoxyCategories Essays , Publications
|
| 2008 |
Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the DatabaseCategories Books , Publications
|
|
Citation: Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
[392 pp., ISBN-10: 0226486966, ISBN-13: 978-0226486963] |
Book of essays on the methodology of the new historicism and other modes of postmodern cultural criticism in the age of the network and the database (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)
| 2008 |
Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database
Categories |
University of Chicago Press, 2008, 392 pages, ISBN-10: 0226486966, ISBN-13: 978-0226486963
[Catalog copy]
Driven by global economic forces to innovate, today’s society paradoxically looks forward to the future while staring only at the nearest, most local present–the most recent financial quarter, the latest artistic movement, the instant message or blog post at the top of the screen. Postmodernity is lived, it seems, at the end of history.
In the essays collected in Local Transcendence, Alan Liu takes the pulse of such postmodern historicism by tracking two leading indicators of its acceleration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: postmodern cultural criticism–including the new historicism, the new cultural history, cultural anthropology, the new pragmatism, and postmodern and postindustrial theory–and digital information technology. What is the relation between the new historicist anecdote and the database field, Liu asks, and can either have a critical function in the age of postmodern historicism? Local Transcendence includes two previously unpublished essays and a synthetic introduction, in which Liu traverses from his earlier work on the theory of historicism to his recent studies of information culture to propose a theory of contingent method incorporating a special inflection of history: media history.
“This book is a reflection of and on a nearly twenty-year career. It is as much a work of history as of literary and cultural critique, as much a narrative and a piece of performance art as it is philosophical investigation and Nietzschean genealogy. Alan Liu is sui generis.”
“Following the magnificent achievement of The Laws of Cool, Alan Liu in Local Transcendence takes on the problem he astutely identified as deeply connected with the ‘cool’: the loss of historical grounding and consequent restructuring of identities by postindustrial corporations. Offering a rigorous yet humane critique of new historicism and cultural criticism from the inside, he interrogates the possibilities for historical grounding in the age of information in a witty prose style and a capacious field of reference. Local Transcendence is required reading for anyone interested in the multiple conjunctions, oppositions, and synergies between information, historicism, and cultural context.”
“Before he turned to digital humanities, Alan Liu once posed the key question for the new historicism: what’s the connection? What’s the connection, for example, between two juxtaposed details or anecdotes in a cultural field? Now he has reframed both inquiries with a broader question that raises the level of both the game and its stakes: what is the connection between the ‘new historicism’ and the ‘new media’? The result is a book that addresses the central question of the ‘link’ itself in our age and that links the link not only conceptually but also historically. It is a book for anyone interested in how disciplinary and technological innovation in the humanities have informed each other over these past two decades.”
|
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements Introduction: Contingent Methods 1. The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism 2. Trying Cultural Criticism: Wordsworth and Subversion 3. Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, 4. Remembering the Spruce Goose: Historicism and Postmodernism 5. The New Historicism and the Work of Mourning 6. The Interdisciplinary War Machine 7. Sidney’s Technology: A Critique by Technology of Literary History 8. “Transcendental Data: Toward A Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse” 9. Escaping History: New Historicism, Databases, and Contingency 
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| 2008 |
“Digital Humanities and Academic Change” (CRASSH, Cambridge U.)Categories Cambridge University 2008 , Talks
|
“Digital Humanities and Academic Change.” Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). Cambridge University. 18 September 2008.
Description of talk in Cambridge University News & Events
| 2008 |
“The New Media Encounter+” (DHRA 2008, Cambridge U.)Categories Cambridge University 2008 , Talks
|
“The New Media Encounter+.” Panel on the Blackwell Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts conference (DRHA 2008). Cambridge University. 17 September 2008.
| 2008 |
“Peopling the Police: A Social Computing Approach to Information Authority in the Age of Web 2.0” (DRHA 2008, Cambridge U.)Categories Cambridge University 2008 , Talks
|
“Peopling the Police: A Social Computing Approach to Information Authority in the Age of Web 2.0.” Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts conference (DRHA 2008). Cambridge University. 15 September 2008. (Photos of Cambridge and DRHA)
| 2008 |
Notes and Links for Talk on “Digital Humanities and Academic Change” (CRASSH, Cambridge U.)Categories Uncategorized
|
1. Department Projects
2. UCSB English Department’s “Center” Model
Collaborative Research or Curricular Development Projects
3. Transformation Triggered by Digital Technology
4. Global Humanism & Transdisciplinarity
Selected Quotations and Concepts
“But within that old territory [of literature], a new object of study: instead of concrete, individual works, a trio of artificial constructs–graphs, maps, and trees–in which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction. ‘Distant reading,’ I have once call this type of approach; where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models” (p. 1).
“By ‘modelling’ I mean the heuristic process of constructing and manipulating models: a ‘model’ I take to be either a representation of something for purposes of study, or a design for realizing something new…. Two effects of computing sharpen the distinction between ‘concept’ on the one hand and the ‘model’ on the other: first, the computational demand for tractability, i.e. for complete explicitness and absolute consistency; second, the manipulability that a digital representation provides…. Take, for example, knowledge one might have of a particular concentration in a deeply familiar work of literature. In modelling one begins by privileging this knowledge, however wrong it might later turn out to be, then building a computational representation of it, e.g. by specifying a structured vocabulary of word-forms in a text-analysis tool. In the initial stages of use, this model would be almost certain to reveal trivial errors of omission and commission. Gradually, however, through perfective iteration trivial error is replaced by meaningful surprise . . . either by a success we cannot explain . . . or by a likewise inexplicable failure” (pp. 24, 25, 25-26)
“The usual object of interpretation is “meaning,” or some set of ideas that can be cast in thematic form. These meanings are sought in different ways: as though resident ‘in’ the work, or evoked through ‘reader-response,’ or deconstructable through a process that would reinstall a structure of intelligibility at a higher, more critical level…. In this paper we want to propose–or recall–another way of engaging imaginative work…. The alternative moves to break beyond conceptual analysis into the kinds of knowledge involved in performative operations–a practice of everyday imaginative life. We will argue that concept-based interpretation, reading along thematic lines, is itself best understood as a particular type of performative and rhetorical operation…. In an undated fragment on a leaf of stationery, Emily Dickinson wrote what appears to be one of her ‘letters to the world’: ‘Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have–a Something overtakes the Mind’ (Prose Fragment 30)…. Our deformations do not flee from the question, or the generation, of ‘meaning.’ Rather, they try to demonstrate–the way one demonstrates how to make something, or do something … that ‘meaning’ in imaginative work is a secondary phenomenon, a kind of meta-data, what Blake called a form of worship ‘Dependent’ upon some primary poetical tale. This point of view explains why, in our deformative maneuvers, interpretive lines of thought spin out of some initial nondiscursive ‘experiment’ with the primary materials. ‘Meaning’ is important not as explanation but as residue. It is what is left behind after the experiment has been run” (pp. 26, 48).
| 2008 |
“Digital Humanities and Academic Change” (Reed C.)Categories Reed College 2008 , Talks
|
“Digital Humanities and Academic Change.” Reed College. 10 September 2008.
| 2008 |
“‘A Forming Hand’: Creativity and Destruction from Romanticism to Emergence Theory” (Reed C.)Categories Reed College 2008 , Talks
|
“‘A Forming Hand’: Creativity and Destruction from Romanticism to Emergence Theory.” Reed College. 9 September 2008. (Photos)
| 2008 |
Suggestions for a 21st-Century English DepartmentCategories Uncategorized
|
| 2008 |
Notes and Links for Talk on “Digital Humanities and Academic Change,” Reed C.Categories Uncategorized
|
1. Solo and Small-Team Projects
2. UCSB English Department’s “Center” Model
Collaborative Research or Curricular Development Projects
3. Transformation Triggered by Digital Technology
4. Global Humanism & Transdisciplinarity
Selected Quotations and Concepts
“But within that old territory [of literature], a new object of study: instead of concrete, individual works, a trio of artificial constructs–graphs, maps, and trees–in which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction. ‘Distant reading,’ I have once call this type of approach; where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models” (p. 1).
“By ‘modelling’ I mean the heuristic process of constructing and manipulating models: a ‘model’ I take to be either a representation of something for purposes of study, or a design for realizing something new…. Two effects of computing sharpen the distinction between ‘concept’ on the one hand and the ‘model’ on the other: first, the computational demand for tractability, i.e. for complete explicitness and absolute consistency; second, the manipulability that a digital representation provides…. Take, for example, knowledge one might have of a particular concentration in a deeply familiar work of literature. In modelling one begins by privileging this knowledge, however wrong it might later turn out to be, then building a computational representation of it, e.g. by specifying a structured vocabulary of word-forms in a text-analysis tool. In the initial stages of use, this model would be almost certain to reveal trivial errors of omission and commission. Gradually, however, through perfective iteration trivial error is replaced by meaningful surprise . . . either by a success we cannot explain . . . or by a likewise inexplicable failure” (pp. 24, 25, 25-26)
“The usual object of interpretation is “meaning,” or some set of ideas that can be cast in thematic form. These meanings are sought in different ways: as though resident ‘in’ the work, or evoked through ‘reader-response,’ or deconstructable through a process that would reinstall a structure of intelligibility at a higher, more critical level…. In this paper we want to propose–or recall–another way of engaging imaginative work…. The alternative moves to break beyond conceptual analysis into the kinds of knowledge involved in performative operations–a practice of everyday imaginative life. We will argue that concept-based interpretation, reading along thematic lines, is itself best understood as a particular type of performative and rhetorical operation…. In an undated fragment on a leaf of stationery, Emily Dickinson wrote what appears to be one of her ‘letters to the world’: ‘Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have–a Something overtakes the Mind’ (Prose Fragment 30)…. Our deformations do not flee from the question, or the generation, of ‘meaning.’ Rather, they try to demonstrate–the way one demonstrates how to make something, or do something … that ‘meaning’ in imaginative work is a secondary phenomenon, a kind of meta-data, what Blake called a form of worship ‘Dependent’ upon some primary poetical tale. This point of view explains why, in our deformative maneuvers, interpretive lines of thought spin out of some initial nondiscursive ‘experiment’ with the primary materials. ‘Meaning’ is important not as explanation but as residue. It is what is left behind after the experiment has been run” (pp. 26, 48).
| 2008 |
“When Was Linearity?: The Meaning of Graphics in the Digital Age”Categories Essays
|
Citation: “When Was Linearity?: The Meaning of Graphics in the Digital Age.” Digital History. Web. August, 2008. <http://digitalhistory.unl.edu/essays/liuessay.php>
| 2008 |
“Literature+”Categories Essays , Publications
|
Citation: “Literature+.” Currents in Electronic Literacy (Spring 2008). <http://currents.dwrl.utexas.edu/2008/literature-plus.html>
| 2008 |
“Emergent Visual Collaboration” (Institute for Multimedia Literacy, USC)Categories Talks
|
“Emergent Visual Collaboration.” Networking Visual Culture brainstorming meeting (for Visual Culture Council). Institute for Multimedia Literacy. University of Southern California. 7 June 2008.
Slides for Alan’s talk (password required)
| 2008 |
“Peopling the Police: A Social Computing Approach to Information Authority in the Age of Web 2.0” (DHSI, U. Victoria)Categories Talks
|
“Peopling the Police: A Social Computing Approach to Information Authority in the Age of Web 2.0.” Digital Humanities Summer Institute. University of Victoria. 16 May 2008.
Slides for talk (password required)| 2008 |
“Plagiarism: Interviews with Victoria Kahn, Alan Liu, David G. Nicholl” (MLA Radio)Categories Interviews
|
“Plagiarism.” Interviews with Victoria Kahn, Alan Liu, David G. Nicholls. Interviewer and producer: Sally Placksin. Radio show for What’s the Word? series. Modern Language Association.
| 2008 |
Notes and Links for Presentation in Lynne Siemen’s seminar on “Issues in Large Project Planning and Management” (DHSI, U. Victoria)Categories Uncategorized
|
Selected UCSB English Department Small-Team Projects
Institutional Implications: UCSB English Department’s “Center” Model
Some (Tentative) Principles of Small-Team Projects
Selected UCSB/UC Large Collaborative Projects
Some Problems of Large, Distributed Projects
| 2008 |
“The Agrippa Process: ‘Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)’ in the Age of Web 2.0” (U. Chicago)Categories Talks
|
“The Agrippa Process: ‘Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)’ in the Age of Web 2.0.” New Media Workshop. University of Chicago. 19 May 2008.
Notes and links on digital humanities and academic change (for additional meeting with the U. Chicago committee on Digital Humanities during visit) (1) | (2)| 2008 |
“Digital Humanities and Academic Change” (U. Chicago)Categories Talks
|
“Digital Humanities and Academic Change.” Meeting with the University Chicago Committee on Digital Humanities. University of Chicago. 19 May 2008.
| 2008 |
Notes and Links #2 for Talks on “Digital Humanities and Academic Change,”Categories Uncategorized
|
Small-Team Projects
UCSB English Department’s “Center” Model
Collaborative Research or Curricular Development Projects
Selected Courses
Selected Quotations and Concepts
“But within that old territory [of literature], a new object of study: instead of concrete, individual works, a trio of artificial constructs–graphs, maps, and trees–in which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction. ‘Distant reading,’ I have once call this type of approach; where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models” (p. 1).
“By ‘modelling’ I mean the heuristic process of constructing and manipulating models: a ‘model’ I take to be either a representation of something for purposes of study, or a design for realizing something new…. Two effects of computing sharpen the distinction between ‘concept’ on the one hand and the ‘model’ on the other: first, the computational demand for tractability, i.e. for complete explicitness and absolute consistency; second, the manipulability that a digital representation provides…. Take, for example, knowledge one might have of a particular concentration in a deeply familiar work of literature. In modelling one begins by privileging this knowledge, however wrong it might later turn out to be, then building a computational representation of it, e.g. by specifying a structured vocabulary of word-forms in a text-analysis tool. In the initial stages of use, this model would be almost certain to reveal trivial errors of omission and commission. Gradually, however, through perfective iteration trivial error is replaced by meaningful surprise . . . either by a success we cannot explain . . . or by a likewise inexplicable failure” (pp. 24, 25, 25-26)
“The usual object of interpretation is “meaning,” or some set of ideas that can be cast in thematic form. These meanings are sought in different ways: as though resident ‘in’ the work, or evoked through ‘reader-response,’ or deconstructable through a process that would reinstall a structure of intelligibility at a higher, more critical level…. In this paper we want to propose–or recall–another way of engaging imaginative work…. The alternative moves to break beyond conceptual analysis into the kinds of knowledge involved in performative operations–a practice of everyday imaginative life. We will argue that concept-based interpretation, reading along thematic lines, is itself best understood as a particular type of performative and rhetorical operation…. In an undated fragment on a leaf of stationery, Emily Dickinson wrote what appears to be one of her ‘letters to the world’: ‘Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have–a Something overtakes the Mind’ (Prose Fragment 30)…. Our deformations do not flee from the question, or the generation, of ‘meaning.’ Rather, they try to demonstrate–the way one demonstrates how to make something, or do something … that ‘meaning’ in imaginative work is a secondary phenomenon, a kind of meta-data, what Blake called a form of worship ‘Dependent’ upon some primary poetical tale. This point of view explains why, in our deformative maneuvers, interpretive lines of thought spin out of some initial nondiscursive ‘experiment’ with the primary materials. ‘Meaning’ is important not as explanation but as residue. It is what is left behind after the experiment has been run” (pp. 26, 48).
Global Humanism
Global humanism is not an older classical or Enlightenment universal humanism–the idea that, as Sir Joshua Reynolds said, there is a “central form” of humanity. And it is also not the modernizing ideal of melting-pot or fusion humanism. Global humanism is not universality or fusion but, as we now say, diversity; not culture but multiculturalism.
(Of course, these latter terms are overused today, but that does not mean that they are just cliché or banal. They are very much alive because the larger social and semantic frameworks that give them meaning are still in the process of collision and adjustment. Diversity and multiculturalism as understood in the academic humanities today, for instance, abuts uncomfortably with the usage of those terms in such other frameworks as neo-corporatism, neo-nationalism, and even neo-regionalism.)
Diversity as Interdisciplinarity
But understanding global humanism requires a diversity rather than harmonium of disciplinary methods capable of revealing the seams between alternative understandings of the “human”–e.g., economic, social, political, historical, cognitive, cultural. Indeed, it may be that we do not have meaningful diversity unless it comprises lived experience refuses to fit in any single, stable organization of the various human knowledges. A case in point would be so-called “marginal” peoples who have almost no global economic or political presence but enormous local cultural, aesthetic, and historical presence only uneasily meshed with the institutions and laws of the new global world order.
Evolutionary Changes
Revolutionary Changes
| 2008 |
Notes and Links #1 for Talks on “Digital Humanities and Academic Change,” U. ChicagoCategories Uncategorized
|
Small-Team Projects
UCSB English Department’s “Center” Model
Collaborative Research or Curricular Development Projects
Selected Courses
Selected Quotations and Concepts
“But within that old territory [of literature], a new object of study: instead of concrete, individual works, a trio of artificial constructs–graphs, maps, and trees–in which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction. ‘Distant reading,’ I have once call this type of approach; where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models” (p. 1).
“By ‘modelling’ I mean the heuristic process of constructing and manipulating models: a ‘model’ I take to be either a representation of something for purposes of study, or a design for realizing something new…. Two effects of computing sharpen the distinction between ‘concept’ on the one hand and the ‘model’ on the other: first, the computational demand for tractability, i.e. for complete explicitness and absolute consistency; second, the manipulability that a digital representation provides…. Take, for example, knowledge one might have of a particular concentration in a deeply familiar work of literature. In modelling one begins by privileging this knowledge, however wrong it might later turn out to be, then building a computational representation of it, e.g. by specifying a structured vocabulary of word-forms in a text-analysis tool. In the initial stages of use, this model would be almost certain to reveal trivial errors of omission and commission. Gradually, however, through perfective iteration trivial error is replaced by meaningful surprise . . . either by a success we cannot explain . . . or by a likewise inexplicable failure” (pp. 24, 25, 25-26)
“The usual object of interpretation is “meaning,” or some set of ideas that can be cast in thematic form. These meanings are sought in different ways: as though resident ‘in’ the work, or evoked through ‘reader-response,’ or deconstructable through a process that would reinstall a structure of intelligibility at a higher, more critical level…. In this paper we want to propose–or recall–another way of engaging imaginative work…. The alternative moves to break beyond conceptual analysis into the kinds of knowledge involved in performative operations–a practice of everyday imaginative life. We will argue that concept-based interpretation, reading along thematic lines, is itself best understood as a particular type of performative and rhetorical operation…. In an undated fragment on a leaf of stationery, Emily Dickinson wrote what appears to be one of her ‘letters to the world’: ‘Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have–a Something overtakes the Mind’ (Prose Fragment 30)…. Our deformations do not flee from the question, or the generation, of ‘meaning.’ Rather, they try to demonstrate–the way one demonstrates how to make something, or do something … that ‘meaning’ in imaginative work is a secondary phenomenon, a kind of meta-data, what Blake called a form of worship ‘Dependent’ upon some primary poetical tale. This point of view explains why, in our deformative maneuvers, interpretive lines of thought spin out of some initial nondiscursive ‘experiment’ with the primary materials. ‘Meaning’ is important not as explanation but as residue. It is what is left behind after the experiment has been run” (pp. 26, 48).
| 2008 |
“Peopling the Police: A Social Computing Approach to Information Authority in the Age of Web 2.0” (UCLA)Categories Talks
|
“Peopling the Police: A Social Computing Approach to Information Authority in the Age of Web 2.0.” Department of Information Studies. UCLA. 15 May 2008.
| 2008 |
“Globalism, Interdisciplinarity, and Digital Technology” (UC Santa Barbara)Categories Talks
|
“Globalism, Interdisciplinarity, and Digital Technology.” Workshop on “The Aesthetics of Imperialism: Matters of Time and Place.” University of California Japanese Arts and Globalizations Multi-Campus Research Group. University of California, Santa Barbara. 11 May 2008.
| 2008 |
“Epilogue to a Research Slam” (UC Santa Barbara)Categories Talks
|
“Epilogue to a Research Slam.” University of California, Santa Barbara. 9 May 2008.
| 2008 |
“Digital Humanities and Academic Change” (Rutgers U.)Categories Talks
|
“Digital Humanities and Academic Change.” Rutgers University, New Brunswick. 2 May 2008.
Notes and links for talks (1) | (2)| 2008 |
“Peopling the Police: A Social Computing Approach to Information Authority in the Age of Web 2.0” (Rutgers U.)Categories Talks
|
“Peopling the Police: A Social Computing Approach to Information Authority in the Age of Web 2.0.” Rutgers University, New Brunswick. 1 May 2008.
| 2008 |
Notes and Links #2 for Talks on “Digital Humanities and Academic Change,” Rutgers U., 2 MayCategories Uncategorized
|
Small-Team Projects
UCSB English Department’s “Center” Model
Collaborative Research or Curricular Development Projects
Selected Courses
Selected Quotations and Concepts
“But within that old territory [of literature], a new object of study: instead of concrete, individual works, a trio of artificial constructs–graphs, maps, and trees–in which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction. ‘Distant reading,’ I have once call this type of approach; where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models” (p. 1).
“By ‘modelling’ I mean the heuristic process of constructing and manipulating models: a ‘model’ I take to be either a representation of something for purposes of study, or a design for realizing something new…. Two effects of computing sharpen the distinction between ‘concept’ on the one hand and the ‘model’ on the other: first, the computational demand for tractability, i.e. for complete explicitness and absolute consistency; second, the manipulability that a digital representation provides…. Take, for example, knowledge one might have of a particular concentration in a deeply familiar work of literature. In modelling one begins by privileging this knowledge, however wrong it might later turn out to be, then building a computational representation of it, e.g. by specifying a structured vocabulary of word-forms in a text-analysis tool. In the initial stages of use, this model would be almost certain to reveal trivial errors of omission and commission. Gradually, however, through perfective iteration trivial error is replaced by meaningful surprise . . . either by a success we cannot explain . . . or by a likewise inexplicable failure” (pp. 24, 25, 25-26)
“The usual object of interpretation is “meaning,” or some set of ideas that can be cast in thematic form. These meanings are sought in different ways: as though resident ‘in’ the work, or evoked through ‘reader-response,’ or deconstructable through a process that would reinstall a structure of intelligibility at a higher, more critical level…. In this paper we want to propose–or recall–another way of engaging imaginative work…. The alternative moves to break beyond conceptual analysis into the kinds of knowledge involved in performative operations–a practice of everyday imaginative life. We will argue that concept-based interpretation, reading along thematic lines, is itself best understood as a particular type of performative and rhetorical operation…. In an undated fragment on a leaf of stationery, Emily Dickinson wrote what appears to be one of her ‘letters to the world’: ‘Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have–a Something overtakes the Mind’ (Prose Fragment 30)…. Our deformations do not flee from the question, or the generation, of ‘meaning.’ Rather, they try to demonstrate–the way one demonstrates how to make something, or do something … that ‘meaning’ in imaginative work is a secondary phenomenon, a kind of meta-data, what Blake called a form of worship ‘Dependent’ upon some primary poetical tale. This point of view explains why, in our deformative maneuvers, interpretive lines of thought spin out of some initial nondiscursive ‘experiment’ with the primary materials. ‘Meaning’ is important not as explanation but as residue. It is what is left behind after the experiment has been run” (pp. 26, 48).
Global Humanism
Global humanism is not an older classical or Enlightenment universal humanism–the idea that, as Sir Joshua Reynolds said, there is a “central form” of humanity. And it is also not the modernizing ideal of melting-pot or fusion humanism. Global humanism is not universality or fusion but, as we now say, diversity; not culture but multiculturalism.
(Of course, these latter terms are overused today, but that does not mean that they are just cliché or banal. They are very much alive because the larger social and semantic frameworks that give them meaning are still in the process of collision and adjustment. Diversity and multiculturalism as understood in the academic humanities today, for instance, abuts uncomfortably with the usage of those terms in such other frameworks as neo-corporatism, neo-nationalism, and even neo-regionalism.)
Diversity as Interdisciplinarity
But understanding global humanism requires a diversity rather than harmonium of disciplinary methods capable of revealing the seams between alternative understandings of the “human”–e.g., economic, social, political, historical, cognitive, cultural. Indeed, it may be that we do not have meaningful diversity unless it comprises lived experience refuses to fit in any single, stable organization of the various human knowledges. A case in point would be so-called “marginal” peoples who have almost no global economic or political presence but enormous local cultural, aesthetic, and historical presence only uneasily meshed with the institutions and laws of the new global world order.
Evolutionary Changes
Revolutionary Changes
| 2008 |
Notes and Links for Talks on “Digital Humanities and Academic Change,” Rutgers U., 2 May 2008)Categories Uncategorized
|
Small-Team Projects
UCSB English Department’s “Center” Model
Collaborative Research or Curricular Development Projects
Selected Courses
Selected Quotations and Concepts
“But within that old territory [of literature], a new object of study: instead of concrete, individual works, a trio of artificial constructs–graphs, maps, and trees–in which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction. ‘Distant reading,’ I have once call this type of approach; where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models” (p. 1).
“By ‘modelling’ I mean the heuristic process of constructing and manipulating models: a ‘model’ I take to be either a representation of something for purposes of study, or a design for realizing something new…. Two effects of computing sharpen the distinction between ‘concept’ on the one hand and the ‘model’ on the other: first, the computational demand for tractability, i.e. for complete explicitness and absolute consistency; second, the manipulability that a digital representation provides…. Take, for example, knowledge one might have of a particular concentration in a deeply familiar work of literature. In modelling one begins by privileging this knowledge, however wrong it might later turn out to be, then building a computational representation of it, e.g. by specifying a structured vocabulary of word-forms in a text-analysis tool. In the initial stages of use, this model would be almost certain to reveal trivial errors of omission and commission. Gradually, however, through perfective iteration trivial error is replaced by meaningful surprise . . . either by a success we cannot explain . . . or by a likewise inexplicable failure” (pp. 24, 25, 25-26)
“The usual object of interpretation is “meaning,” or some set of ideas that can be cast in thematic form. These meanings are sought in different ways: as though resident ‘in’ the work, or evoked through ‘reader-response,’ or deconstructable through a process that would reinstall a structure of intelligibility at a higher, more critical level…. In this paper we want to propose–or recall–another way of engaging imaginative work…. The alternative moves to break beyond conceptual analysis into the kinds of knowledge involved in performative operations–a practice of everyday imaginative life. We will argue that concept-based interpretation, reading along thematic lines, is itself best understood as a particular type of performative and rhetorical operation…. In an undated fragment on a leaf of stationery, Emily Dickinson wrote what appears to be one of her ‘letters to the world’: ‘Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have–a Something overtakes the Mind’ (Prose Fragment 30)…. Our deformations do not flee from the question, or the generation, of ‘meaning.’ Rather, they try to demonstrate–the way one demonstrates how to make something, or do something … that ‘meaning’ in imaginative work is a secondary phenomenon, a kind of meta-data, what Blake called a form of worship ‘Dependent’ upon some primary poetical tale. This point of view explains why, in our deformative maneuvers, interpretive lines of thought spin out of some initial nondiscursive ‘experiment’ with the primary materials. ‘Meaning’ is important not as explanation but as residue. It is what is left behind after the experiment has been run” (pp. 26, 48).
| 2008 |
“Knowledge 2.0: Social Computing, the Humanities, and Public Knowledge in the Age of Web 2.0” (Indiana U.)Categories Talks
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“Knowledge 2.0: Social Computing, the Humanities, and Public Knowledge in the Age of Web 2.0.” The Truth of the Humanities Lecture Series. Indiana University. 16 April 2008.
| 2008 |
Link library for Alan’s presentation at the graduate seminar on “The Truth of the Humanities” related to the lecture seriesCategories Uncategorized
|
Small-Team Projects
UCSB English Department’s “Center” Model
Collaborative Research or Curricular Development Projects
Selected Courses
Selected Quotations and Concepts
“But within that old territory [of literature], a new object of study: instead of concrete, individual works, a trio of artificial constructs–graphs, maps, and trees–in which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction. ‘Distant reading,’ I have once call this type of approach; where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models” (p. 1).
“By ‘modelling’ I mean the heuristic process of constructing and manipulating models: a ‘model’ I take to be either a representation of something for purposes of study, or a design for realizing something new…. Two effects of computing sharpen the distinction between ‘concept’ on the one hand and the ‘model’ on the other: first, the computational demand for tractability, i.e. for complete explicitness and absolute consistency; second, the manipulability that a digital representation provides…. Take, for example, knowledge one might have of a particular concentration in a deeply familiar work of literature. In modelling one begins by privileging this knowledge, however wrong it might later turn out to be, then building a computational representation of it, e.g. by specifying a structured vocabulary of word-forms in a text-analysis tool. In the initial stages of use, this model would be almost certain to reveal trivial errors of omission and commission. Gradually, however, through perfective iteration trivial error is replaced by meaningful surprise . . . either by a success we cannot explain . . . or by a likewise inexplicable failure” (pp. 24, 25, 25-26)
“The usual object of interpretation is “meaning,” or some set of ideas that can be cast in thematic form. These meanings are sought in different ways: as though resident ‘in’ the work, or evoked through ‘reader-response,’ or deconstructable through a process that would reinstall a structure of intelligibility at a higher, more critical level…. In this paper we want to propose–or recall–another way of engaging imaginative work…. The alternative moves to break beyond conceptual analysis into the kinds of knowledge involved in performative operations–a practice of everyday imaginative life. We will argue that concept-based interpretation, reading along thematic lines, is itself best understood as a particular type of performative and rhetorical operation…. In an undated fragment on a leaf of stationery, Emily Dickinson wrote what appears to be one of her ‘letters to the world’: ‘Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have–a Something overtakes the Mind’ (Prose Fragment 30)…. Our deformations do not flee from the question, or the generation, of ‘meaning.’ Rather, they try to demonstrate–the way one demonstrates how to make something, or do something … that ‘meaning’ in imaginative work is a secondary phenomenon, a kind of meta-data, what Blake called a form of worship ‘Dependent’ upon some primary poetical tale. This point of view explains why, in our deformative maneuvers, interpretive lines of thought spin out of some initial nondiscursive ‘experiment’ with the primary materials. ‘Meaning’ is important not as explanation but as residue. It is what is left behind after the experiment has been run” (pp. 26, 48).
| 2008 |
“When Was Linearity? The Meaning of Graphics in the Age of Knowledge Work” (UC Santa Barbara)Categories Talks
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“When Was Linearity? The Meaning of Graphics in the Age of Knowledge Work.” Keynote talk at the “Seeing Knowledge Work” Graduate Symposium. Department of Art and Architecture. University of California, Santa Barbara. 11 April 2008.
| 2008 |
“Peopling the Police: A Social Computing Approach to Information Authority in the Age of Web 2.0” (UC Santa Barbara)Categories Audio/Video , Talks
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“Peopling the Police: A Social Computing Approach to Information Authority in the Age of Web 2.0.” Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS). University of California, Santa Barbara. 21 February 2008.
Video of talk (56 min.)
| 2008 |
English 236, “Literature+” (Winter 2008)Categories Graduate Courses , Selected Recent Courses
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Course site: http://english236-w2008.pbwiki.com/
Course Description: Because of the recent, shared emphasis in many fields on digital methods, scholars in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences increasingly need to collaborate across disciplines. This course reflects theoretically and practically on the new digitally-facilitated interdisciplinarity by asking students to choose a literary work and treat it according to one or more of the research paradigms prevalent in other fields of study.
Students, for example, can choose a story or poem to model, simulate, map, visualize, encode, text-analyze, sample, mashup, storyboard, blog, or redesign as a game, machinima, database, hypertext, or virtual world.
English 236 studentsWhat are the strengths and weaknesses of one kind of research paradigm by comparison with others, including the new paradigms in the literary field that some scholars have recently called distance reading (as opposed to “close reading”) and modeling? For instance, what is the relation between interpreting and data-mining or visualizing?
This graduate-level course begins with discussion of selected readings and demos to set the stage. Readings include: Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees, Willard McCarty’s Humanities Computing, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuel’s “Deformance and Interpretation,” and Stephen Ramsay’s “Algorithmic Criticism.” Demos include: the NetLogo agent-modeling environment, the Scratch visual programming environment, digital mapping tools, text-analysis programs, “mashup”-creation tools, the Ivanhoe literary interpretation game, visualization/ pattern-discovery tools, machinima-creation tools, Second Life, and other resources usable by non-programmers to create interesting projects.
After the initial unit of the course, students break into teams, choose a literary work, and collaborate in workshop/lab mode to produce a “proof-of-concept” final project. (Alternatively, students wishing to create a project in support of their dissertation may choose to work individually.) Collaboration will occur both face-to-face and virtually in the class wiki (possibly supplemented by virtual meetings in the UCSB English Department’s new Second Life instructional space). Final projects can be digital, video, acoustic, material, social, or some combination, but some digital representation must be created that can be exhibited on the class wiki or in the English Department’s gallery space in Second Life. Individual students also prepare research reports as well as write a final essay reflecting on the project.
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Audio of Alan’s talk (mp3)
