Alan Liu

Citation: Alan Liu, “Messages and Values ??in the Age of Machine Learning: From Postcards to Social Media,” Prace Kulturoznawcze 26, no. 4 (2023): 125–29, https://doi.org/10.19195/0860-6668.26.4.8.

• Excerpt (first paragraphs):
  If Stanislaw Pietraszko were to update his essay “Messages and Values” today, would he write about social media instead of postcards?
  Superficially, the analogy between postcards and social media seems unavoidable. After all, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media transmit short messages of text, images, and/or videos characterized by the same feature that Pietraszko noticed distinguishes postcards from letters: “the public availability of the verbal text” (and other content). One can assume, then, that Pietraszko and other scholars of the “axiosemiotics” of the postcard such as Zdzislaw W?sik would today also wish to discuss social media forms whose “excessive” and “redundant” performativity (to use Pietraszko’s terms) make them objects not just of information but also, and often primarily, of culture. After all, the visual “filters” that users frequently apply to their Instagram or TikTok posts are perfect examples of such excess or redundancy. There is almost no informational and only cultural value, for instance, in making oneself look like a cat.
  Yet one doubts that Pietraszko would have been content with just a superficial comparison of postcards to social media. His theoretical analysis was systemic in its aims, focusing on postcards to formulate a general relation between “messages and values” based on the difference between the semiotic function of information and the axiological values of culture. One surmises that today Pietraszko would want to pursue the same kind of systemic analysis by looking deeper into the systems of information and culture behind social media—a level of analysis, however, that poses challenges to his axiosemiotic approach.
• Excerpt (last paragraph):
  “Culture … is neither communication nor information,” Pietraszko wished to believe. But for those working in data science now, the challenge is that communication and information are saturated by cultural values that cannot be partitioned off. Reciprocally, for those working in cultural studies, the challenge is that cultural values increasingly are fused to the instrumental functions of communication and information (as when a “like” in social media is exploited by the system to promote an advertisement). Instrumental functions cannot be compartmentalized from values because in the final analysis the very concept of instrumentality or functionality (and its underlying logics of cause and effect) are changing. Functionalism now incorporates probabilistic operations of predictive modeling that—as technology companies like to say—“just work,” but work in semiotically non-understandable ways that perhaps most resemble how culture works.

“What is Good Writing in the Age of ChatGPT?”, speech for English Department commencement ceremony, 18 June 2023.

• Full Text of Speech
   
  What is good writing in the age of ChatGPT (which, as you know, is the most celebrated of the new generative artificial-intelligence tools based on large language models that can write prose, verse, and lies just like a human being)?

  That’s the question I call on you as graduating English majors to help society answer as you bring your skills in writing and speaking well — and in knowing well through language and its literatures — into the world….

  [go to full speech]

Citation: “Theses on Large Language Models and ‘Good’ Writing” Alan Liu, 4 December 2022. doi:

4 December 2022

1/8 As an English professor working in the digital humanities, my takeaway from ChatGPT (& large-language-model discourse generators in general) is that society will soon need to decide which values associated with “good” writing can and will be offloaded to LLMs so that the value added by humans can be shifted to a smaller or restructured spectrum of the functions of “good” writing for which humans can be recognized, rewarded, and held responsible.

Citation:”Data Moves: Libraries and Data Science Workflows.” Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age. Ed. Susan Mizruchi. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020: 211-219.

• Abstract: Library-based collections and repositories are today advancing well beyond accumulating resources in digital form for the purposes of searching, reading, and other primary access. New advances toward treating collections as “always already data” facilitate next-generation computational uses of digitized materials—for example, treating collections as datasets for advanced datamining analysis.
          In considering how library collections can serve as data for a variety of data ingestion, transformation, analysis, reproduction, presentation, and circulation purposes, it may be useful to compare examples of data workflows across disciplines to identify common data-analysis “moves” as well as points in the data trajectory that are especially in need of library support because they are for a variety of reasons brittle. Drawing on the precedent of so-called in silico science—which has had a ten-year start on developing methods and standards for tracking the provenance of data, annotating and visualizing data analysis workflows for reproducibility, and comparing data workflows in different fields—Liu argues that other disciplines such as the humanities and social sciences can exploit today’s library data collections in similar ways. The goal is twofold: first, open, shareable, and reproducible data scholarship, and second, higher or meta-level analysis of such scholarship. For example, might methods for comparing data workflows in the sciences (seeing, e.g., how astrophysics compares with medical science in using data) be extended across the disciplines to the digital humanities, digital arts, and digital social sciences? Beyond borrowing science data paradigms for other disciplines, Liu also thinks in the reverse direction. He draws on the twentieth-century tradition of literary and ethnographical analysis—for example, the idea of the narrative “motif” or “move” (in the Russian: mov)—to suggest that humanities and social science approaches to data workflows are just as crucial as scientific ones. After all, however one analyzes data (and in which field), one ultimately has to tell the story of that workflow and its results. That puts the problem squarely in the domain of narrative motifs and moves, which Liu argues can be matched to data workflow moves.

Citation:“Toward a Diversity Stack: Digital Humanities and Diversity as Technical Problem.” PMLA 135.1 (2020): 130-151.

• DOI: 10.1632/pmla.2020.135.1.130.
• Open access (post-embargo published version in institutional repository, PDF) [TBD]
• Paywalled (published version, PDF)
• Abstract: How can the digital humanities help support humanities scholarship on diversity both ideologically and technically? This essay abandons the diversity paradigm prevalent in DH—the “big tent”—for a more technically functional one: the “stack.” It proposes that DH can create a “diversity stack” (conceptually like the “Internet protocol stack”) that combines technical and theoretical strategies for advancing scholarship on diversity. From low to high, crucial levels in such a stacked approach include technical methods for dealing with multilingualism, multimedia, unrepresentative corpora, geopolitical and temporal organizations of identity, and the theory of identity.

Citation: “Digital Humanities Diversity as Technical Problem” Alan Liu, 15 January 2018. doi:10.5072/FK2222ZR81.

15 January 2018

Our “Varieties of DH” panel addresses the methodological and social diversity of the digital humanities, in part by drawing on the digital humanities meme of the “big tent,” originally the declared theme of the international DH conference when it was held at Stanford University in 2011.[1]  To quote the program description for our panel today, DH is “expansive, movable, but precarious, a tent still not big enough in terms of diversity and access.”[2]

The “big tent” metaphor, of course, comes down to us from old-timey showcases of mass experience such as nineteenth-century tent revivals and big-top circuses. Those were just two of the mass architectures, apparatuses, institutions, and (to use Foucault’s word) dispositifs whose paradoxically open and enclosed forms stage-managed the modernizing encounter (variously democratic, cultic, or fascist) between an older, affinity-based sense of the Volk and the newer awareness–at once enraptured, entertained, and appalled–of social, racial, linguistic, geopolitical, and even “special” in the sense of cross-species) variety. Circuses, for example, were spectacles of variety. As advertised in a nineteenth-century Barnum & Bailey poster, they are “a glance at the great ethnological congress” and also menagerie of “curious . . . animals.”[3] We can add earlier and later examples to the catalogue of paradoxically open/closed, inclusive/exclusive variety–for instance, the French Revolutionary Champs de Mars, whose remaking for the 1790 Fête of Federation famously convened Parisians both low and high[4]; Albert Speer’s “cathedral of light” (Lichtdom) ringed by searchlights at the Nuremberg Nazi rallies; and today’s conceptual architecture of  “open source” programming (not the “cathedral,” Eric Raymond memorably said, but the “bazaar”).[5]

What’s next for DH? I think what’s next is finally to put the “big tent” metaphor to rest. We need new paradigms and dispositifs or, in computer-speak, platforms for diversity that move the modern democratic paradox of open and closed (inclusive and exclusive) beyond nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century paradigms of mass “variety,” beyond the mid- to late-twentieth-century scientizing of such variety as statistical socioeconomics, and likely also beyond current “bags of words” cultural analytics approaches, which bring up the rear with topic models and other congregations of language standing in for the big tent (or bag) of mass human experience.

Among other things, in other words, diversity is a technical problem….

Citation:“Teaching ‘Literature+’: Digital Humanities Hybrid Courses in the Era of MOOCs.” Teaching Literature: Text and Dialogue in the English Classroom. Ed. Ben Knights. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017: 133-153.

Citation: “Assessing Data Workflows for Common Data ‘Moves’ Across Disciplines” Alan Liu, 6 May 2017. doi: 10.21972/G21593.

6 May 2017

In considering how library collections can serve as data for a variety of data ingest, transformation, analysis, reproduction, presentation, and circulation purposes, it may be useful to compare examples of data workflows across disciplines to identify common data “moves” as well as points in the data trajectory that are especially in need of library support because they are for a variety of reasons brittle.

We might take a page from current research on scientific workflows in conjunction with research on data provenance in such workflows. Scientific workflow management is now a whole ecosystem that includes integrated systems and tools for creating, visualizing, manipulating, and sharing workflows (e.g., Wings, Apache Taverna, Kepler, etc.). At the front end, such systems typically model workflows as directed, acyclic network graphs whose nodes represent entities (including data sets and results), activities, processes, algorithms, etc. at many levels of granularity, and whose edges represent causal or logical dependencies (e.g., source, output, derivation, generation, transformation, etc.) (see fig. 1). Data provenance (or “data lineage” as it has also been called in relation to workflows) complements that ecosystem through standards, frameworks, and tools–including the Open Provenance Model (OPM) the W3C’s PROV model, ProvONE, etc. Linked-data provenance models have also been proposed for understanding data-creation and -access histories of relations between “actors, executions, and artifacts.” In the digital humanities, the in-progress “Manifest” workflow management system combines workflow management and provenance systems. . . .

Citation:”Hacking the Voice of the Shuttle: The Growth and Death of a Boundary Object.” Social Media Archeology and Poetics. Ed. Judy Malloy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016: 261-271.

• Full text (open-access author’s pre-copy-edited final version in institutional repository, PDF)

Citation:“Is Digital Humanities a Field? — An Answer from the Point of View of Language.” Journal of Siberian Federal University: Humanities and Social Sciences 7 (2016): 1546-1552.

• Full text.

Citation:”N + 1: A Plea for Cross-Domain Data in the Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. University of Minnesota Press, 2016: 559-568.

• Open-access full text (published version)

Citation: “Drafts for Alan Liu, Against the Cultural Singularity (book in progress.” Alan Liu, 2 May 2016. https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/drafts-for-against-the-cultural-singularity

Citation: “Hello (again), world!.” Alan Liu, 4 October 2015. https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/hello-again-world/

This is the inaugural message I posted to the new “digital-humanities@lsmail.ucsb.edu” listserv at UC Santa Barbara, which I started in October 2015. The posting was made on 4 October 2015.

Citation: Research Report: ”How Public Media in the U.S. and U.K. Compare in Their Terminology For the Humanities.” WhatEvery1Says Project, 4Humanities.org. (3 August 2015), DOI: 10.5072/FK2FN18G5G

First page

Citation: Liu, Alan, and William G. Thomas III. “Humanities in the Digital Age.” Between Humanities and the Digital. Ed. Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015: 45-40.

First page

Citation:”The Big Bang of Online Reading.” Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories. Ed. Paul Longley Arthur and Katherine Bode. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014: 274-90.

• DOI of book: 10.1057/9781137337016
• Full text (open-access author’s pre-copy-edited final version in institutional repository, PDF)

Citation: “Theses on the Epistemology of the Digital: Advice For the Cambridge Centre for Digital Knowledge.” Alan Liu, 14 August 2014. https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/theses-on-the-epistemology-of-the-digital-page

5 March 2014

My friend and first editor, Helen Tarter — Editorial Director of Fordham University Press and formerly editor at Stanford University Press — died in a car accident on March 4th, 2014. (Fordham UP announcement) Helen was a formative influence on my writing and career who took a gamble on my sprawling first book Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford UP, 1989) and nurtured it into print. I will always remember her support, the discipline she inspired rather than required, and the fluid, sparkling stream of her conversation (carried out in a voice so soft that I hear it in my mind whenever I reread Wordsworth’s “Nutting” and come to the line on “the murmur, and the murmuring sound”).

The following is excerpted from the beginning of the Acknowledgments in my second book (my first book “after Helen”):

Citation: Scott Pound and Alan Liu, “The Amoderns: Reengaging the Humanities — A Feature Interview with Alan Liu.” aModern, 2 (2013). https://amodern.net/article/the-amoderns-reengaging-the-humanities/

Citation: “‘Why I’m In It’ x 2 — Antiphonal Response to Stephan Ramsay on Digital Humanities and Cultural Criticism.” Alan Liu, 13 September 2013. https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/why-im-in-it-x-2-antiphonal-response-to-stephan-ramsay-on-digital-humanities-and-cultural-criticism/

Citation: “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities.” PMLA 128 (2013): 409-23.

• DOI: 10.1632/pmla.2013.128.2.409.
• Open access (post-embargo published version in institutional repository, PDF)
• Paywalled (published version, PDF)
• Video of lecture at New York University (May 1, 2013) based on fuller version of the paper subsequently published in PMLA. (1 hr. 47 min.)
• Translation of essay: “¿Qué significación tienen las humanidades digitales para las humanidades?”, Revistes científiques de la Universitat de Barcelona, no. 23 (2020).

Citation: “The Digital Humanities and Identity Issues.” Alan Liu, 11 May 2013. https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/the-digital-humanities-and-identity-issues/

Citation: “Is Digital Humanities a Field? — An Answer From the Point of View of Language.” Alan Liu, 6 March 2013. https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/is-digital-humanities-a-field-an-answer-from-the-point-of-view-of-language/

Citation: Alan Liu (lead author), Rama Hoetzlein, Rita Raley, Ivana Anjelkovic, Salman Bakht, Joshua Dickinson, Michael Hetrick, Andrew Kalaidjian, Eric Nebeker, Dana Solomon, and Lindsay Thomas. “Friending the Humanities Knowledge Base: Exploring Bibliography as Social Network in RoSE.” White Paper for the NEH Office of Digital Humanities: Rose Digital Humanities Start-up Grant (Level 2) HD-51433-11 (9/1/2011 TO 9/30/2012).

Citation: “From Reading to Social Computing.” Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology. Ed. Kenneth M. Price and Ray Siemens. MLA Commons. Modern Language Association of America. 2013. Web. <https://dlsanthology.mla.hcommons.org/from-reading-to-social-computing/>

Citation: Alan Liu and William G. Thomas III, “Humanities in the Digital Age.” Inside Higher Ed — Views, 1 October 2012. http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/10/01/essay-opportunities-humanities-programs-digital-era/

Citation: “The Humanities and Tomorrow’s Discoveries.” 4Humanities, 25 July 2012. http://4humanities.org/2012/07/alan-liu-the-humanities-and-tomorrows-discoveries/

Citation: “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” Ed. Matthew K. Gold. Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012: 490-509.

• Full text of essay in online open access edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities

Citation: “Translitteraties: le big bang de la lecture en ligne.” Trans. Françoise Bouillot. E-Dossiers de l’audiovisuel, January 2012. INA Expert (Inathèque of France). Web.

• Full text (open access published version in institutional repository, PDF)
• Full text (open access publisher’s version, HTML)

Citation: “The State of the Digital Humanities: A Report and a Critique.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 11.1-2 (2012): 8-41. DOI: 10.1177/1474022211427364.

• Open access (author’s pre-publication final version in institutional repository, viewable online and downloadable as PDF)
• Paywalled (published version, PDF)

Citation: “Friending the Past: The Sense of History and Social Computing.” New Literary History, 42.1 (2011): 1-30. DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2011.0004

• Open access (published article in institutional repository, viewable online and downloadable as PDF)
• Paywalled (published version, PDF)

First page

Citation: “‘So What?’: New Tools and New Humanities Paradigms.” Response to Monica Bulger, Jessica Murphy, Jeff Scheible, and Elizabeth Lagresa, “Interdisciplinary Knowledge Work: Digital Textual Analysis Tools and Their Collaboration Affordances.” Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies. Ed. Laura McGrath. Logan, UT: Computers and Composition Digital Press / Utah State University Press, 2011. 272-75. (Available online.)

• Open-access full text (published version, PDF) (“‘So What?'” response essay at end, pp. 272-275)

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.

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/

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

Citation: “Thinking Destruction: Creativity, Rational Choice, Emergence, and Destruction Theory.” Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, 1.1 (October 15, 2009). <https://web.archive.org/web/20101021080612/http://arcade.stanford.edu/journals/occasion/node/24>

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/

Citation: “Digital Humanities and Academic Change.” English Language Notes 47 (2009): 17-35

• Open-access version (PDF) (corrected page proofs)