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Essays

2025	“Liberal Arts Pantocrator: Addendum to ‘Data Science and the Post-Liberal Arts University'” Categories Essays

Citation: “Liberal Arts Pantocrator: Addendum to ‘Data Science and the Post-Liberal Arts University.’” KCWorks, 24 Sept 2025. https://doi.org/10.17613/vnybw-f6a84.

Abstract: The following fragment discussing two early pictorial illustrations of the liberal arts was originally part of my article on “Data Science and the Post-Liberal Arts University” (Critical Inquiry 51, no. 4 (2025): 597–618) but had to be cut due to length limitations. The fragment complements the article’s final section on “A Post-Liberal Arts Curriculum (2),” which discusses what is “needed for the post-liberal arts to enhance existing efforts in the liberal arts to be more inclusive of their social margins and global peripheries—in particular, by acknowledging the heritage of applied knowledge embedded in the very notion of such margins and peripheries” (612-618).

2025	“Data Science and the Post-Liberal Arts University” Categories Essays

Citation: “Data Science and the Post-Liberal Arts University.” Critical Inquiry 51, no. 4 (2025): 597–618. https://doi.org/10.1086/735621.

Abstract: Data science has grown explosively in higher education, offering undergraduate degrees in the US on a “core and domains” curricular model that overlaps with—and in an intriguing way—replicates the multidisciplinary model of liberal arts education. This essay treats data science as a pathfinder for the continuing evolution of American higher education from the liberal arts to a post-liberal arts centered on applied knowledge, including today’s new modes of predictive/generative knowledge. The essay builds toward a consideration of how the post-liberal arts university can teach students both to apply knowledge and to know the meaning (historical, intellectual, and social) of application. A key for the post-liberal arts university will be to teach preprofessionalism in ways that do not just acknowledge the historical exclusion of the people of applied knowledge (at the social margins and global peripheries) from liberal arts education for the “free man” but turns such acknowledgement into new forms of liberal arts knowledge. Data science, the essay concludes, has the potential to contribute novel ways of conceptualizing intersectionality in general and in relation to applied knowledge. But data science is also constrained in this regard on the global scene where data power belongs to many regions and actors without a shared tradition of liberal arts education and thus a framework for a post-liberal arts carrying on shared ideas and practices of freedom.

2023	“Messages and Values in the Age of Machine Learning: From Postcards to Social Media” Categories Essays

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.

2020	“Data Moves: Libraries and Data Science Workflows” Categories Essays

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.

2020	“Toward a Diversity Stack: Digital Humanities and Diversity as Technical Problem” Categories Essays

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.

2017	“Teaching ‘Literature+’: Digital Humanities Hybrid Courses in the Era of MOOCs” Categories Essays

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.

2016	“Hacking the Voice of the Shuttle: The Growth and Death of a Boundary Object” Categories Essays

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)

2016	“Is Digital Humanities a Field? — An Answer from the Point of View of Language” Categories Essays

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.

2016	“N + 1: A Plea for Cross-Domain Data in the Digital Humanities” Categories Essays

First page

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)

2015	“Humanities in the Digital Age” (with William Thomas III) Categories Essays

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.

2014	“The Big Bang of Online Reading” Categories Essays

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)

2013	“Reengaging the Humanities” (aModern interview) Categories Essays , Interviews

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/

2013	“The Meaning of the Digital Humanities” Categories Essays

First page

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).

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