Alan Liu

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.'”

This was the digital version of a ham radio club I started on my campus in 1995 for faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates in several departments (including English and Art) who were early enthusiasts of Web authoring. Included our Web show, a tools page, a project proposal page, and inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari.

“1995 calling 2013: transmission begins. . . .”

Co-edited with Laura Mandell, The Romantic Chronology was database-driven hypertext chronology of the Romantic period with a links-archive and other resources designed to provide a historically-organized introduction to online materials in the area. A “Philosophy of this Site” page includes theoretical essays by the editors as well as Rita Raley and Carl Stahmer (serving at that time as research assistants for the project).

The site started in 1995 as a series of large static HTML tables. Then, in 1999, the site became one of my first attempts to create a database-to-Web site (using Filemaker, though at this time I was also experimenting with other limited database programs such as Access before graduating to SQL Server and, later, to modern content management systems with LAMP architecture and MySQL databases).

By 2013, when Laura and I had long stopped developing or adding content to the site, the old Filemaker database (a problem for my English Department’s sysadmin to maintain) was retired. The site was “flattened” in static HTML form for archival purposes.

Original, static HTML version of my Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research. I started VoS in late 1994 as a Web site restricted to my campus (U. California, Santa Barbara), then made it world-accessible on 21 March 1995 as the root site of UCSB’s first humanities server (named humanitas.ucsb.edu at that time). Links were collected primarily using the text-only Lynx browser (for speed over a 2400 baud modem) even though the Mosaic graphical browser had recently appeared. My colleague Victoria Vesna in Art scanned and Photoshopped the logo for me, using a bolt of fabric loaned by my colleague in English Shirley Lim.

From its origin to October, 1999, VoS stayed at the same address on the Humanitas server. It grew in that period to over 70 pages of links to humanities and humanities-related resources on the Internet. Its mission was to provide a structured and briefly annotated guide to online resources that at once respects the established humanities disciplines in their professional organization and points toward the transformation of those disciplines as they interact with the sciences and social sciences and with new digital media. An essay I published in 1998 narrates the origin and mission of VoS (“Globalizing the Humanities: ‘The Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research.’” [pdf]).

In October 2001, after a year of development work by Jeremy Douglass and Robert Adlington, VoS was rebuilt as a database-to-Web site. A SQL-injection hacker attack on the site a few years later led to extensive further work by Douglass to harden the site.

Most of link collection, description, and maintenance was done solo (though for a brief period I had some funding and assistance from graduate students). I gradually slowed in collecting and fixing links for VoS over the years as portals and search engines became more generally used. Work on the site effectively stopped after c. 2009.