Alan Liu

Course site: http://english149-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 concept of literary study by asking students to choose a literary work and treat it according to one or more of the research paradigms prevalent in other fields. Students, for example, can choose a story or poem to model, simulate, map, visualize, encode, text-analyze, sample, storyboard, blog, or redesign as a game, database, hypertext, or virtual world. What are the strengths and weaknesses of literary interpretation, close reading, or theory by comparison with other research methods?

The 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, and Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. 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 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. 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.

This course counts for the Literature and Culture specialization. It is a 5-unit course that includes some lab time (for collaborative work and learning digital tools) outside the scheduled class hours.

Citation: “Imagining the New Media Encounter.” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. 3-25

• Full text also available online.

“Knowledge 2.0: The Transliteracies Project and Social Computing.” University of California, Irvine. 19 November 2007.

• Detailed report of talk by Liz Losh, Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course at UC Irvine
• More photos of Peter Krapp, Robert Nideffer, Game Culture Technology Lab, etc.

“Digital Humanities and Academic Change.” Co-speaker with Lyn Hejinian, State of the Profession Colloquia series. Department of English. University of Colorado, Boulder. 11 October 2007.

• Link Library for Alan’s Presentation
• More photos of Lyn Hejinian, University of Colorado at Boulder English Department, and Boulder

“Knowledge and Web 2.0: The Transliteracies Project and Social Computing.” Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research. Texas A & M University. 4 October 2007.

• More photos of Texas A&M campus, Center for the Study of Digital Libraries, English Department, etc.

“Digital Humanities and Academic Change.” University of Auckland. 31 August 2007.

• Link library to facilitate discussion.
• Link library #2 to facilitate discussion.
• More photos of Auckland/U. Auckland

“Digital Humanities and Academic Change.” Victoria University, Wellington. 30 August 2007.

• Link library to facilitate discussion.
• Link library #2 to facilitate discussion.

Presentation at discussion meeting to exchange ideas on the role of the humanities in information-technology development strategy with representatives of the National Library of New Zealand, The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, and Research and Education Advanced Network New Zealand( REANNZ). National Library of New Zealand, Wellington. 29 August 2007.

• Link library to facilitate discussion.
• Link library #2 to facilitate discussion.

“Digital Humanities and Academic Change.” Seminar on recent trends in research in the humanities and arts; with co-discussant Julie Ellison. Victoria University, Wellington. 29 August 2007.

• Link library to facilitate discussion.
• Link library #2 to facilitate discussion.
• More photos

“Beyond ‘Good Enough’ Knowledge: The Humanities and Public Knowledge in the Age of Web 2.0.” Keynote for the Te Whāinga Aronui — The Council for the Humanities’ Transformations Congress. Victoria University, Wellington. 28 August 2007.

• More photos of Transformations Congress and Wellington

Sterling Publishing, 2003, 48 pp., 35 illustrations, ISBN-10: 0806982772, ISBN-13: 978-0806982779

Introduction

I. Nature

• “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
• “To a Butterfly”
• “Inscriptions Supposed to be Found in and near a Hermit’s Cell, 1818: III”
• Lines Written in Early Spring
• My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold

II. Children & Young People

• “The Reverie of Poor People”
• “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”
• “Lucy Gray: or, Solitude”
• “The Solitary Reaper”
• “Alice Fell: or, Poverty”

III. The Present and the Past

• “The Two April Mornings”
• “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”
• “It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free”
• “The White Doe of Rylstone (Excerpt)”
• “Surprised by Joy”

IV. Scenes from The Prelude

• The Stolen Boat
• The Boy of Winander
• Climbing Mt. Snowdon

V. Growing Up

• From “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”

Citation: “Higher Education and Online Lifelong Learning: Five Theses.” Academy Exchange, Issue 6 (Summer 2007): 34-35.

“Knowledge 2.0? — The University and Web 2.0.” “Renewals” Conference. English Subject Centre. Royal Holloway, University of London. 6 July 2007.

• Conference site.
• Video of talk (54 min.)
• Conference blog report on the talk.
• Alan’s photos.

“Overview of University of California Transliteracies Project.” Distinguished Seminar at the Institute of Creative Technologies. De Montfort University. Leicester, UK. 3 July 2007.

• IOCT Publicity Announcement.
• Report and pics of the talk from Jess Laccetti’s blog.
• Flickr photos of visit to De Montfort U.

“Network Knowledge: Policing Web 2.0.” New Network Theory International Conference. Amsterdam, Netherlands. 28 June 2007.

• Conference site.
• Conference blog report on the talk.
• Alan’s photos | Other conference photos.
• Stray impressions of Amsterdam.

Nicole King. “Meaningful Contexts: An Interview with Alan Liu.” English Subject Centre Newsletter, 12 (April 2007): 6-9.

• Full text

“Imagining the New Media Encounter.” Keynote lecture for “Interfaces and Visualizations: A State-of-the-Art Conference on the Humanities in Post-human Times” and Center for Advanced Study’s MillerComm Lecture Series. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 20 April 2007.

* Publicity flyer for lecture.
* Video of talk (1 hr 22 min.; RealVideo)
* Audio only (1 hr 22 min.; RealAudio)

Citation: “The Humanities: A Technical Profession.” Andrew Delbanco, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Alan Liu, and Catharine R. Stimpson, The Idea and Ideals of the University. ACLS Occasional Paper No. 63, 2007.

• Full text (.pdf format)

[Note: This paper was first presented as a talk at the Annual Meeting of the ACLS, 8 May 2004, then revised slightly for publication in 2007 in the ACLS Occasional Papers online series. Though this revision stays close to the talk, it adopts some of the changes made for the first published essay version of the paper: the 2005 article (also titled “The Humanities: A Technical Profession”) in Teaching, Technology, Textuality: Approaches to New Media, ed. Michael Hanrahan and Deborah Madsen (Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 11-26.]

(For an excerpt, see the entry for the above mentioned, closely similar, 2005 article.)

Course site: http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/curriculum/courses/overview.asp?CourseID=295

Course description: This introductory lecture course studies contemporary information culture from the viewpoint of the humanities. What is information, and why is it so important that it not only affects our economy, politics, and society but also our culture (the culture of “cool,” it has been called) and our arts (the “new media” literatures, arts, music, and games). The course brings writings about information society together with works of new-media literature and art to study the following aspects of information: information as media, communication, and “new media”; information as work and power; and information as identity (see the Schedule page for details). Required readings are in print (e.g., Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, William Gibson’s novel, Neuromancer), on the Web, and on CD-ROM (M. D. Coverley’s hypertext novel, Califia).

Assignments include some Web-authoring at the beginner’s level. No pre-existing technical skills are needed, but the ability to access the Web is necessary to do the online readings.

This course counts toward the English Dept’s specialization in Literature and the Culture of Information.

Course site: http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/curriculum/courses/overview.asp?CourseID=290

Course Description: This course consists of two parts:

I. Romantic Landscape (7 weeks) This part of the course attends to the specificity of Romantic landscape during the so-called British “long 18th century” or (in art history) “great century”–i.e., to the unique contribution of Romanticism to an era when in great part landscape was art and art was landscape. Rivaled perhaps only by the novel, with which it was on intimate terms, landscape was the epic of the times. It was the familiar of that other great Romantic epic form: autobiography. This part of the course concentrates on the writings of the Wordsworth circle and the paintings and watercolors of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. These materials are developed against a backdrop that includes 18th-century writers and painters, the aesthetic theories of the picturesque and sublime, and the history and theory of “descriptive” genres (including georgic and locodescription).

II. New Forms of Landscape (3 weeks) Whether developed in conceptual, metaphorical, or virtual form, navigable space–and often specifically landscape–is important to the contemporary artistic imagination. The course will conclude by making the transition through late-nineteenth-century landscape photography (Carlton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge) to modern and contemporary forms of landscape imagination, including “land art” and new-media art. Materials include: the work of Robert Smithson, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Long, Charlotte Davies, John Klima, and Sue Thomas as well as such forms as computer games and satellite imagery. The wager of the course is that we can learn something about the use of landscape as a major form of the social imaginary if we juxtapose Romantic poets and artists walking through nature and contemporary poets and artists browsing or navigating the networks.

The course is supported by an Online Image Gallery (login required).

“The Agrippa Process: ‘Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)’ in the Age of Web 2.0.” Conference on “The Extreme Contemporary.” Center for the Study of the Novel. Stanford University. 12 January 2007.

• Conference publicity announcement.
• Draft of paper — for conference respondents only (version 1.1d, posted Jan. 10, 2007; only very minor fixes in this latest version) (140 Kb; Adobe .pdf format) (requires login): Liu.pdf
• Slideshow accompanying the paper — for conference respondents only (6.26 Mb; PowerPoint .ppt format) (requires login): Liu-slides.ppt
• Slideshow accompanying the paper — for conference respondents only (Web version of above PowerPoint show for Internet Explorer only) (requires login): Liu-slides.htm

Citation: “Understanding Knowledge Work.” Criticism 47 (2005): 249-60. Essay written as invited response to Johanna Drucker’s and N. Katherine Hayles’s reviews in the same issue of Criticism of The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information

• Full text — HTML | .pdf (Project Muse)
• Full text of the reviews of The Laws of Cool to which this essay responds (Project Muse):
  • N. Katherine Hayles, “Attacking the Borg of Corporate Knowledge Work: The Achievement of Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool” — HTML | .pdf
  • Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Games and the Market in Digital Futures” — HTML | .pdf

Citation: “A Transformed Revolution: The Prelude, Books 9-13.” William Wordsworth’s “The Prelude”: A Casebook. Ed. Stephen Gill. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 341-75.

[Excerpt from chapter 8 of Wordsworth: The Sense of History.]

“The Transliteracies Project: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading.” Panel on “Contexts for Electronic Editing.” Modern Language Association convention. Philadelphia. 29 December 2006.

“Knowedge 2.0? The Relation of the University to Web 2.0.” “Creating and Consuming Culture in the Digital Age” lecture series. Virginia Commonwealth University. 16 November 2006.

• Publicity announcement

“Thinking Destruction: Creativity, Rational Choice, Emergence, and Destruction Theory.” Inaugural conference of the National Humanities Center initiative on “Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity: The Human and the Humanities.” National Humanities Center. Research Triangle, North Carolina. 10 November 2006.

• Video of talk (34 min.)
• Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity (ASC) website

“Knowedge 2.0? — The University and Web 2.0.” “New Directions in Humanities Research” lecture series. Stanford Humanities Center. Stanford University. 5 October 2006.

• Publicity announcement

“The Future of the Humanities in the Digital Age.” Pauley Symposium on “History in the Digital Age.” University of Nebraska—Lincoln. 22 September 2006.

• Report on the talk (and the ensuing discussion) posted to the conference blog.
• Interview with Alan Liu recorded at the symposium (Quicktime files)

Interview with Alan Liu conducted during the Pauley Symposium on “History in the Digital Age.” University of Nebraska—Lincoln. 22 September 2006.

Quicktime files:
• Interview

“Knowledge 2.0? — What is the Relation of the University to ‘Web 2.0’?” Panel on “Technology and the Future of the Humanities.” Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory (SECT III) on “technoSpheres.” University of California, Irvine. 23 August 2006.

“Transliteracies: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Online Reading.” Special session on Text Processing and the Humanities. Society for Text and Discourse Sixteenth Annual Meeting. Minneapolis, MN. 15 July 2006.

This is the professional home page of Alan Liu, Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). The English Department at UCSB also maintains a less complete bio page for Alan Liu.

See also Nothing Transcendental: Alan Liu’s Ad Hoc Site for Ordinary Business: “Here, the ordinary and routine business of professional life finds shelter from the pressure to be any more than it simply is.”

I am Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I taught from 1987 to 2025. I was also an affiliated faculty member of UCSB’s Media Arts & Technology graduate program. At the beginning of my career (1979-1986), I was Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor in Yale University’s English Department and British Studies Program.

I began my research in the field of British romantic literature and art. My first book, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford Univ. Press, 1989), explored the relation between the imaginative experiences of literature and history. In a series of theoretical essays in the 1990s, I explored cultural criticism, the “new historicism,” and postmodernism in contemporary literary studies.

Subsequently, I was an early and now continuing voice in the “digital humanities” field. This started in 1994, when I created my Voice of the Shuttle Web site for humanities research. That was the era when I began to study information culture as a way to close the circuit between the literary or historical imagination and the technological imagination. In 2004, I published my The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Univ. of Chicago Press). In 2008, I also published from Univ. of Chicago Press my Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. A new book is appeared from the same press in 2018: Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age.

In the late 1990’s, I founded the NEH-funded Teaching with Technology project at UC Santa Barbara called Transcriptions: Literature and the Culture of Information, and my English Dept’s undergraduate specialization on Literature and the Culture of Information. During 2002-2007 I was a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) and chair of the Technology/Software Committee of the ELO’s PAD Initiative (Preservation / Archiving / Dissemination of Electronic Literature). Digital initiatives I then led in the 2000s include Transliteracies: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading, a University of California multi-campus, collaborative research group (2005-10); and RoSE (Research-oriented Social Environment), a software project funded by a NEH Digital Humanities Start-up grant (2011-12) that is the culmination of Transliteracies.

I founded and am co-leader of the international 4Humanities advocacy initiative in 2010. During 2017-2021, I was Principal Investigator of the 4Humanities WhatEvery1Says (WE1S) research project, which was supported by a $1.1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. WE1S digital methods to study a big-data corpus of public discourse about the humanities, and created resources and toolkits for speaking up for the values of the humanities in today’s society. In 2022-2023, I chaired the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Information Technology. Currently I am focusing on co-founding and serving as co-president of the Center for Humanities Communication.

“Overview of Transliteracies Project.” Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. University of Maryland, College Park. 27 April 2006.