An early conference panel Web site that I built with Laura Mandell for the session on “The Canon and the Web: Reconfiguring Romanticism in the Information Age” at the MLA convention in Washington D. C., 29 December 1996. In his paper titled “Distant Mirrors and the LAMP” at the MLA convention in 2013, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum has discussed this site as an early “distant mirror” of the later web in its attempt to “situate the session amid a thick contextual network,” its “clear desire for interactivity, as expressed through the live email links and the injunction to initiate correspondence,” and its “curatorial sensibility.”
Date of site: 26 March 1996.
Date of event: 29 December 1996.
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. . . .”
Date of site: 18 October 1995. (Earliest Internet Archive capture: 21 November 1996)
- Many Wolves site (archival version of site as captured in Internet Archive, 21 November 1996)
This is one of the earliest “blog” essays I wrote–so early that it preceded the era of blogs.
Citation: “Should We Link to the Unabomber? An Essay on Practical Web Ethics.” English Department, UC Santa Barbara, 9 October 1995. http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ayliu/research/whyuna.htm
Excerpt
Date: 9 October 1995
Background: The Emergence of the Unabomber Manifesto on the Net
Shortly after the publication of the Unabomber’s “Manifesto on Industrial Society and its Future” in the New York Times and Washington Post on Sept. 19, 1995, Time-Warner mounted the Manifesto on its Web server and made it available as a subpage (titled “Unabomber: Tightening the Net”) from its Pathfinder home page. The link to the full text of the Manifesto is accompanied on the “Tightening the Net” page by links to a variety of mainstream media stories and commentary as well as by updates on the FBI’s manhunt. Copies of the Manifesto have subsequently also appeared on other servers on the net.
The Issue: To Link or Not to Link From a Scholarly Research Page
The Manifesto, its context, and its reception are events of major interest to scholars in such fields as science-technology-and-culture, sociology, journalism, etc. This is all the more so because the distinctly academic style of argumentation and language in the Manifesto (which comes complete with the bomber’s endnotes) establishes an intense feedback loop or “reverb” with the academic institutions whose faculty and staff have been among the bomber’s favorite targets—and casualties.
Given the nature of the Manifesto’s original publication history, however (i.e., violently coerced), the ethics of participating to any degree in the further dissemination of the document is problematic. This is certainly the case if one were considering mounting a duplicate of the whole document on one’s server. But it is also the case, however attenuated and primarily symbolic, if one is merely considering creating a link to the document as it exists on someone else’s server.
In the broadest perspective, the Unabomber incident is a uniquely compelling test of the ethics of pure research. . . .
A “technical experiment and theoretical allegory” based on the work of Jean-François Lyotard. In this early attempt to explore the then-new dynamic capabilities of hypertext, I use now obsolete “client-pull” Web methods to create a series of automated tracks of Lyotard’s thought. The site includes a short theoretical essay on “philosophy of this page.”
Date of Site: August 1995.
My primer for colleagues learning about the Internet. 124 pp.; “published” in bound form in 1994 and sold for $11 through my campus bookstore.
Date: 5 October 1994
URL: http://vos.ucsb.edu
Role: Creator and editor (“weaver”).
One of the earliest humanities research portals. VoS began in 1994 as a 70+ Web-page directory of humanities research resources organized by field, historical period, author, etc. Its original mission was to seduce other humanities scholars onto the Web by showing them available online humanities materials. Vos was reimplemented in 2001 as a database-to-Web system allowing for dynamic views of the data (general to specific) and user contributions.
Suggested Citation: Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research. Ed. Alan Liu. [Date of page when accessed, e.g., 27 September 2006]. University of California, Santa Barbara. Retrieved [Date of access, e.g., 27 September 2006]. <http://vos.ucsb.edu/>
