Alan Liu

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

URL: https://www.eliterature.org
Role: Member, ELO Board of Directors, 2002-present.

The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature. Since its formation, the Electronic Literature Organization has worked to assist writers and publishers in bringing their literary works to a wider, global readership and to provide them with the infrastructure necessary to reach one another. ELO’s PAD initiative arose in 2002 with the goal of creating the institutional and technical protocols needed to “preserve” works of new media literature (vulnerable to changing hardware and software platforms) by migrating them into future technological environments.

• ELO home page.
• PAD Initiative. (See also “Born-Again Bits: A Framework for Migrating Electronic Literature.”)

URL: https://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu”
Role: Director and Principal Investigator.
Transcriptions is a curricular development and research project in the UC Santa Barbara English department started with a NEH Teaching with Technology grant in 1998. Project faculty and graduate students create courses and research materials related to:

• The social, political, economic, and cultural contexts that now make “information” so powerful;
• The equivalent contexts that have always made literature itself an “information technology,” including the cultures of orality, manuscript, print, etc.

Transcriptions also includes an undergraduate curricular track for English majors: the Literature and Culture of Information Specialization (http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/curriculum/lci/).

The full title of this site is Palinurus: The Academy and the Corporation – Teaching the Humanities in a Restructured World. I created the Palinurus site beginning in February 1998 to encourage critical thought about the corporatization of higher education and the relation between academic “knowledge” and postindustrial “knowledge work”; includes a rationale statement, featured controversies suggested readings, and a gallery of quotations. (Some material submitted by contributors.)

The site fills me with melancholy when looking back on it now from the vantage point of 2013 after continued decreases in public funding for universities; the Great Recession beginning in 2007; the “privatization” of public universities; the trend toward “accountability” and “assessment” of education; the push by technology-industry leaders, pundits, and politicians for MOOC online courses to take up the slack; and other symptoms of the colonization of higher-education institutions by neoliberal philosophies and management structures native to contemporary business.

The original rationale statement for the Palinurus site begins: “This pilot site was built by higher-education humanities scholars who have awakened to the combined practical and intellectual challenge to higher education posed by business in the era of ‘knowledge work,’ ‘learning organizations,’ and ‘information society.'”

Date: February 1998

• Palinurus Site
• Selected Pages of Interest (select links on home page, which is a frame page):
  • Rationale statement
  • Featured Controversies, inclduing “Dearing Report (U.K.),” “Cal State ‘Technology Infrastructure Initiative’ (U.S.),” “New Zealand ‘Green Paper’ and its Critics.”
  • Suggested Readings in the following areas
    • The Idea of Business
    • The Idea of the University
    • Academe and Business
    • Information Tech and the Academy

Date of site: 26 March 1996.
Date of event: 29 December 1996.

    Go to site

Date of site: 18 October 1995. (Earliest Internet Archive capture: 21 November 1996)

• Many Wolves site (archival version of site as captured in Internet Archive, 21 November 1996)

Citation: “Should We Link to the Unabomber? An Essay on Practical Web Ethics.” English Department, UC Santa Barbara, 9 October 1995. http://oldsite.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ayliu/research/whyuna.htm

Date: August 1995.

    Go to site

Date of site: 1995.

• Original static HTML version of site (screen capture image only)
• Earliest version of site captured in the Internet Archive, 16 August 2000 (database-generated version of site)
• Current “flattened” static HTML version of site (created for archival purposes after the database version of the site was retired in 2013)

Date: 5 October 1994

• Ultrabasic Guide to the Internet (full text as .pdf) (ported from a page-making program into PDF with some loss of elegance in formatting; bookmarks added to chapters)
• Image I create for the guide illustrating the Internet as it appears through the “windshield” while driving on the information superhighway.

      

URL: http://vos.ucsb.edu
Role: Creator and editor (“weaver”).
One of the earliest humanities research portals. VoS began in 1994 as a 70+ Web-page directory of humanities research resources organized by field, historical period, author, etc. Its original mission was to seduce other humanities scholars onto the Web by showing them available online humanities materials. Vos was reimplemented in 2001 as a database-to-Web system allowing for dynamic views of the data (general to specific) and user contributions.

Date: December 1994

• Earliest archived version of VoS as the root site on the first UCSB humanities server (humanitas.ucsb.edu) (static HTML version), Internet Archive, 1996
• Earliest archived version of VoS at the vos.ucsb.edu address (static HTML version), Internet Archive, 1999
• Selected Pages of Interest (from the 1999 version of site):
  • “What the Allusion Means” (my early hypertext experiment in explaining the “voice of the shuttle” title
  • English Literature Main Page
  • Literary Theory Page
  • Cultural Studies Page
  • Cyberculture Page
  • Science, Technology, & Culture Page
  • Technology of Writing Page
  • Postindustrial Business Theory Page
  • Laws of Cool Page (“cool” sites)
• My essay on the origin and mission of VoS: “Globalizing the Humanities: ‘The Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research.’” Humanities Collections 1.1 (1998): 41-56. [full-text manuscript of essay (.pdf)]
• Current version of VoS (database-generated version)