• Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message” (1964) 
  (Note: read only this essay. The PDF also includes another essay)

• Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982) 
   (alternative URL for archived version) | (plain-text archived version)

  Read the following pages:

  • 17-27
  • 29 (read the discussion of Marshall McLuhan on this page)
  • 31-66

• [Continued from previous class.]

• Plato, Myth of Theuth on the invention of writing (short excerpt from Plato’s Phaedrus)
• Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), pp. 77-103 
• Alberto Manguel,
  • “The Silent Readers”, from his A History of Reading (1996)
  •  “How Pinocchio Learned to Read”, open-access version of essay from his A Reader on Reading (2011), read only pp. 1-9 

• Distracted Reading (and “Unthought”)
  • Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (2008) [This link is to the UCSB libarary subscription for The Atlantic Monthly] (2008)
    • [Or access the article here directly from The Atlantic Monthly with a subscription or free trial]
  • Paul La Farge, “The Deep Space of Digital Reading” (2016)
  • N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (2017), pp. 9-14 (available on course Canvas)
• Machine Reading (“Distant Reading”)
  • Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Lieberman Aiden, et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books” (2011)  [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through the campus network or from off-campus through the UCSB VPN or Library Proxy server]
     Alternative sites/versions of the article: site 1 |  site 2 |  site 3 (figures at end of article in this version)

• Familiarize yourself with the following three artist’s books (for a definition of “artist’s book,” see Wikipedia article):
  • Agrippa: A Book of the Dead, an artist’s-book created in 1992 by Kevin Begos, Jr., Dennis Ashbaugh, and William Gibson. The work is documented on The Agrippa Files, which was created by UCSB English Dept. faculty and students in 2005. Read the following pages on The Agrippa Files site to learn about the artist’s book. (Note: the site is useable without the Flash reader that some of its pages originally featured) :
    • Introduction
    • Description of the book
    • Photos of selected pages (“Deluxe” edition)
    • Description and information about William Gibson’s poem on the diskette in the book
    • Prof. Liu’s discussion of the diskette and code in the book (Alan Liu, “Cracking the Agrippa Code: How the Disk Worked”)
    • Also be sure to read the full text of the William Gibson’s poem as once posted on the writer’s official site (and now archived in the Internet Archive) [alternative source for poem]
  • Shelley Jackson
    • “Snow” (2014-) (story/poem written in the media forms of snow and Instagram) (Note: if you do not have an Instagram account, you can get the essential idea of the work by looking on the course Canvas site at a screenshot of the most recent posts for the work and a text-only transcription of the whole work to date.)
    • Scott Rettbert and Shelley Jackson, “Room for So Much World: A Conversation with Shelley Jackson” (2019) (Read the first half of the interview related to “Snow”)
  • Danny Cannizzaro and Samantha Gorman, Pry (2014)
    • Trailer video preview of Pry, a novella in the form of an iOS app for Apple iPad (Note: you do not need to buy the iOS app; it will be shown in lecture)

• Claude E. Shannon, “The Mathematical Theory of Communication,” pp. 3-6 (1948)
• Warren Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication” (1949)
   (Alternative site/version)

• Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think” (1945) (Life Magazine‘s December 1945 condensed version of article originally published in The Atlantic in July 1945. Read pp. 112-113 and 119-124)
• Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (2003), pp. 13-36, 44-45
• Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (1996), pp. 233-58 (available on course Canvas)

• Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (2003), pp. 283-97 (available on course Canvas)
• Richard T. Griffiths, “From ARPANET to World Wide Web” (2002)
• W3C Schools, HTML Tutorial — Go to the W3Schools HTML Tutorial page and look quickly at the explanations in the first 7 lessons linked in the left sidebar (from “HTML Introduction” to “HTML Paragraphs”). Also selectively look at the explanations for other lessons of interest to you.  (Optionally: click on the “Try it Yourself” button to open a two column interactive page where you can write HTML on the left, hit the “Run” button, and see the results rendered on the right.)

• Digital “New Media”
  • Lev Manovitch, The Language of New Media (2001):
    • pp. 18-48 (this starts at p. 30 of the PDF file: the section titled “What is New Media?”)
    • 218-28 (this starts at p. 134 of the PDF file)
• “Web 2.0”
  • Tim O’Reilly, “What is Web 2.0” (2005), read only the first Web page of this article (which has a total of five Web pages)

• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) — by today’s class read at a minimum the first two chapters, pp. 1-30. (If possible, read to p. 88 by today’s class.)
  (Print book) (Please purchase from an online vendor or through the UCEN Bookstore. See info on specific editions and ordering options.)
• Optional readings:
  • Help on the concept of entropy;  See also these two short, fun videos: 4-minute video | 5-minute video (the latter includes explanation of “Maxwell’s Demon”)
  • History of (and recent work on) “Maxwell’s Demon”
  • About English Renaissance “revenge tragedies”
  • About the Thurn & Taxis family and postal system

• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) — finish rest of the novel. (Print book) 

• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) — finish rest of the novel. (Print book) 

• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) — finish rest of the novel. (Print book) 

50-minute exam in class on readings in the course to date. The exam is “factual” or “objective” in its coverage of the readings and ideas of the course. It is designed to reward students who have regularly kept up with the assignments and attended lectures and sections.

See fuller description.

 (No blue books needed for exam, but bring a pen.)

• “Scientific Management” (The Original “Smart Work”)
  • Frederick Winslow Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (1911)
    • Chap. 2; read only first 14 pages of the PDF.
    • Excerpt on bricklaying
• “Knowledge Work” (Today’s Smart Work)
  • Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), pp. 82-84 (on “creative destruction”)
  • Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988), pp., 3-12 (available on course Canvas)
  • Joseph H. Boyett and Henry P. Conn, Workplace 2000 (1992), pp. 1-45  (available on course Canvas)
  • Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline (1990), pp. 3-14 (available on course Canvas)

• William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone, The Virtual Corporation (1992), pp. 1-19, 50-66, 184-205, 214-16 (available on course Canvas)
• Wendy Brown interviewed by Timothy Shenk, “What Exactly is Neoliberalism?” (2015)
• [Optional:  Manuel Castells, “Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the Network Society” (2000)
  (read only the abstract & the sections titled “The Network Society: An Overview” and “Social Structure and Social Morphology: From Networks to Information Networks” on the pages numbered 9-17)]

• Early “Cyberlibertarianism”
  • John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (1996)
  • Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology” (1996). (Optional: for fun, read Louis Rossetto, Rebuttal of the Californian Ideology, 1998)
  • Critical Art Ensemble, “Electronic Civil Disobedience” (1996) (read only the main essay, not the appendices)
     alternative site that works in iOS Safari browser (the essay is the first chapter of the whole book by the CAE at this site]
  • Jodi (network artist pair): home page. Click around and see what you can understand about this page and its subpages. (Info about Jodi)

• Donna J. Haraway, Excerpts from “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), chapter 8 in her book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991)   — The PDF contains the whole book. Read only following excerpts from the “A Cyborg Manifesto” chapter in the book:
  • pp. 149-155
  • pp. 161-165
  • pp. 170-173
  • p. 181

• William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
  (Print book) (Please purchase from an online vendor or through the UCEN Bookstore. See info on specific editions and ordering options.)
  • For the best understanding of Professor Liu’s lectures, read half the novel by this class if you can.

• William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984) (Print book) 
  • For the best understanding of Professor Liu’s lectures, finish the novel by this class if you can.

• William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984) (Print book) 
  • Finish the novel by this class if you have not already done so.

• William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984) (Print book) 
  • Finish the novel by this class if you have not already done so.

• William Warner, Kimberly Knight, and UCSB Transliteracies History of Reading Group, “In the Beginning was the Word: A Visualization of the Page as Interface” (Note: the original Flash animation, which was interactive, is no longer viewable because the Flash program reached “end of life” at the end  of 2020 and is no longer supported in current browsers and operating systems. View instead the MP4 video version, or download the AVI or WMV video versions.)
• Yin Liu, “Ways of Reading, Models for Text, and the Usefulness of Dead People” [PDF or HTML] (2013)
• Michael Witmore, “Text: A Massively Addressable Object” (2012)
• Wikipedia, “Markup Language” (read just for the main concepts, not the details)
• Alan Liu, “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse” (2004) (read only pp. 49-57)

• Ted Underwood, “Seven Ways Humanists Are Using Computers to Understand Text” (2015)
• Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, “A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method” (2012)

• David M. Blei, “Probabilistic Topic Models” (2013) — (read only to end of p. 79, before the math begins)
• Ted Underwood, “Topic Modeling Made Just Simple Enough” (2012)
• Andrew Goldstone’s interface for exploring topic models. The Signs model has some extra, later-developed features. Especially helpful in learning how to work with these models is the guide page on “Interpreting the topic model of Signs“
  • topic models of 100 years of literary criticism journals
  • topic models of 40 years of the Signs journal of “Women in Culture and Society”

• The thought-prompts for this concluding lecture are the ideas of “deformance” and “glitch” in the literary/artistic use of information technology.
  • Lisa Samuels and Jerome J. McGann, “Deformance and Interpretation” (1999) — (read only p. 25-30, and also get a sense of the “deformance” experiments in section V, p. 36-45, and the appendix, p. 50-53) [alternate link]
    [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through the campus network or from off-campus through the UCSB VPN or Library Proxy server]
    • Also available in an unpaginated HTML version (read on;y Sections 1-2 and the first four paragraphs of Section 3, and also get a sense of the “deformance” experiments in section V and the appendix)
  • Mark Sample, “Notes Towards a Deformed Humanities” (2012)
  • Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um)] (2011) (read pp. 7-31: “Introduction,” “Glitch Manifesto,” “A Technological Approach to Noise,” and “The Perception of Glitch”)    See also Menkman’s site: http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com