Quarter: Fall 2024 | Instructor: Alan Liu | Office Hours: By appt.
Class Meeting Time: Tuesdays, 2:00-4:50 pm Location: South Hall 2635
Clippings from desk of Ernest T. Liu, a chief engineer of the World Trade Center
In an era when complexly hybrid material-virtual infrastructures, ranging from the micro to the macro in scale, seem to obviate older distinctions between the material base and cultural superstructure, how can the humanities, digital humanities, and media studies join the social sciences, science technology studies, design and planning fields, and arts in an emergent “critical infrastructure studies”? What are the traditions of such studies? What are some especially high-value areas for intervention by humanities scholars of past and present periods? And how do critical infrastructure studies bear on continuing problems of social justice, including (infra) structural racism?
Program input unit using punched film strip, Konrad Zuse Z1 computer (1938), Museum of Technology, Berlin (Photo: Alan Liu)
This course explores the hypothesis that critical infrastructure studies is one of today’s renewed forms of cultural criticism and media theory. Looking at the world from the point of view of infrastructure — and of the people (and creatures) who at once shape and are shaped by infrastructure — allows us to ask different questions than those posed in the frame of “culture” or “media.” We’ll think broadly about the things, platforms, containers, walls, passageways, and gates — material, mediated, and symbolic — that structure who we are in relation to the world and each other.
The course draws on selected materials from the CIstudies.org bibliography curated by Alan Liu to pursue a sequence of approaches to infrastructure, including those grounded in ethnography, science technology studies (STS), media infrastructure studies, digital humanities, social justice studies, “repair” and “waste” studies, and literature and the arts (especially poetry).
Assignments: Students create a “starter kit” exhibit of readings and other materials for infrastructure studies in their areas of interest, and they also write either a set of research blog posts or a research essay.
Quarter: Fall 2020 | Instructor: Alan Liu | Office Hours: W 1-3 pm
Class Meeting Time: T, 2:00-4:20 pm (Pacific time) Location: Transcriptions Center (South Hall 2509)
Voyant Tools analysis of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850)
This course provides a graduate-level introduction to the digital humanities. The course introduces major types of digital humanities work and central topics and controversies. It asks students to develop project ideas and public visibility in their intended professional field in its relation to the digital humanities. Major topics include: the emergence of the digital humanities; the relation of DH to the humanities and data science; the logic of text encoding and methods of text analysis (including quantitative analysis, topic modeling, and social network analysis); theory and issues of the archive in the digital age (including in relation to issues of diversity); space and time in the digital humanities (including mapping and timelimes); data narratives; and the new horizon of neural-network artificial intelligence methods.
A key aspect of the course is the balance it seeks between ideas and technology. Far-reaching ideas from both the human past and present are reexamined from a technological perspective, and, just as important, vice versa.
Assignments in the course train graduate students in the digital humanities (through practicums); develop their knowledge of and professional profile in their intended research field (through blog research posts, an essay, or the creation of an online bibliography); and incubate a “mock grant proposal” for a digital-humanities project (which might be the basis of later work included in a dissertation). (Due to the constraints of a 10-week quarter, the proposed project need not be fully implemented.)
Clippings from desk of Ernest T. Liu, a chief engineer of the World Trade Center
In an era when complexly hybrid material-virtual infrastructures, ranging from the micro to the macro in scale, seem to obviate older distinctions between the material base and cultural superstructure, how can the humanities, digital humanities, and media studies join the social sciences, science technology studies, design and planning fields, and arts in an emergent “critical infrastructure studies”? What are the traditions of such studies? What are some especially high-value areas for intervention by humanities scholars of past and present periods? And how do critical infrastructure studies bear on continuing problems of social justice, including (infra) structural racism?
Program input unit using punched film strip, Konrad Zuse Z1 computer (1938), Museum of Technology, Berlin (Photo: Alan Liu)
This course explores the hypothesis that critical infrastructure studies is one of today’s renewed forms of cultural criticism and media theory. Looking at the world from the point of view of infrastructure — and of the people (and creatures) who at once shape and are shaped by infrastructure — allows us to ask different questions than those posed in the frame of “culture” or “media.” We’ll think broadly about the things, platforms, containers, walls, passageways, and gates — material, mediated, and symbolic — that structure who we are in relation to the world and each other.
The course draws on selected materials from the CIstudies.org bibliography curated by Alan Liu to pursue a sequence of approaches to infrastructure, including those grounded in ethnography, science technology studies (STS), media infrastructure studies, digital humanities, social justice studies, “repair” and “waste” studies, and literature and the arts (especially poetry).
Assignments: Students create a “starter kit” exhibit of readings and other materials for infrastructure studies in their areas of interest, and they also write either a set of research blog posts or a research essay.
“Nowhere in our history of the humanities did we come across an acute divide between the humanities and science. Both humanists and scientists search for underlying patterns, which they try to express in logical, procedural or mathematical formalizations. There is, moreover, a continuity between humanistic and scientific disciplines as regards the ‘nature’ of the patterns.”
–Rens Bod, A New History of the Humanities (2013)
This course explores today’s quickening mutation of the “liberal arts” into “data science,” a new universal mode of knowledge touching all fields. The course focuses on the join, but also split, between how the humanities and data science find meaning (scientific, epistemological, sociopolitical, and cultural) in patterns. Topics to be probed include: the history and present state of the humanities, the concept of “data science” (including the shape of today’s new programs and majors in the field), the idea and structures of “data,” the idea and infrastructures of “big data,” humanities corpora and datasets (including the social and ethical problem of “representative” datasets), narrativizing data, visualizing data, and interpreting data. The course includes but is not limited to approaches related to the digital humanities.
Assignments in the course include:
Writing a short prospectus for a research topic and project related to the humanities and data science.
Writing a full-scale research proposal for the project in the form of a mock grant proposal that also includes a bibliography, “miniature big-dataset” (a sample of an envisioned dataset), and early experiments in researching and analyzing the dataset. (The proposed project does not need to be fully enacted during the course.)
In an era when complexly hybrid material-virtual infrastructures, ranging from the micro to the macro in scale, seem to obviate older distinctions between the material base and cultural superstructure, how can the humanities, digital humanities, and new media studies join in an emergent “critical infrastructure studies”? What are the traditions of such studies? What are some especially high-value areas for intervention by humanities scholars of past and present periods, digital humanists, and new media scholars or artists? And how can such scholars learn from those in the social sciences and science-technology studies taking up similar matters?
Program input unit using punched film strip, Konrad Zuse Z1 computer (1938), Museum of Technology, Berlin (Photo: Alan Liu)
This course explores the hypothesis that critical infrastructure studies is one of today’s renewed forms of cultural criticism and media theory. Looking at the world from the point of view of infrastructure — and of the people (and creatures) who at once shape and are shaped by infrastructure — allows us to ask different questions than those posed in the frame of “culture” or “media.” We’ll think broadly about the things, platforms, passageways, containers, and gates — material, mediated, and symbolic — that structure who we are in relation to the world and each other.
Assignments: Students create a “starter kit” exhibit of readings and other materials for infrastructure studies in their areas of interest, and they also write either a set of research blog posts or a research essay.
