Alan Liu

Presentation Agenda

1. Early Humanities Computing
   
   
2. Recent Directions in Humanities Computing
   
   
3. Two Current Research Projects

Early Humanities Computing (1980s to early 1990s)

• Diversity of disciplinary paradigms:
  
  
  • Textual editing
    
    
  • Composition: "Computers and Writing"
    
    
  • Computer-Mediated Communications (CMC)
    
    
  • Media studies
    
    
  • Creative Arts (visual artists, experimental fiction writers)
    
    
  • Core Humanities (e.g., English, History departments)
    
    
• Typical early humanities uses of computing:
  
  

  Textual analysis (e.g., TACT, ALLC, the early ACH) Text encoding (e.g., TEI [example], U. Virginia Electronic Text Center, Brown U. Women Writers Project, IATH, Blake Archive) "Library"/"Book" model

  "Hypertext" Literature ?

Recent Directions in Humanities Computing
(mid-1990s to early 2000s)

• Convergence of Disciplinary Paradigms:
  
  
  • "New Media"Studies—e.g., Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001); Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, ed., The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003); future UC Berkeley New Media program
    
    
  • "New Media Studies" =
    
    

    Network Studies/Cultural Studies + (Humanities, Arts, Media Studies, etc.) + "Codework" Studies

    
    
    For example:
    
    • Networked Art/Literature (e.g., Lisa Jevbratt, Noah Wardrip-Fruin)
      
      
    • "Media Archaeology" (e.g., Friedrich Kittler, William Warner, UCSB English Dept.; Digital Retroaction conference; Alan Liu, "Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse," "Escaping History: the New Historicism, Databases, and Contingency")
      
      
    • Culture of Information (e.g., Rita Raley, UCSB; A. Liu, UCSB)
      
      
    • Wendy Chun (Brown U. Modern Culture & Media Dept.)
      
      
    • "Codework literature" (e.g., Mez, Ted Warnell, John Cayley); "Database Aesthetics"
      
      
      
• Recent "New Media" uses of computing:
  
  

  Text encoding XML (e.g., Michael Sperberg McQueen, Liam Quin) (some recent initiatives) Databases ("West Coast model") (e.g., UC DARnet, UCSB English Dept., A. Liu, VoS, ""Escaping History: the New Historicism, Databases, and Contingency," "Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse" ) Toward "Web services" convergence?

Two Current Research Projects

• Electronic Literature Organization's PAD Initiative (Preservation / Archiving / Dissemination) ("Acid-Free Bits," "Born-Again Bits")
  
  
• UCSB Transliteracies Project (Conference: June 17-18, 2005) (early proposal)
  
  
  • Transliteracies Planning Group:
    
    
    • Alan Liu, English (UCSB) [Project Leader]
    • Kevin C. Almeroth, Computer Science (UCSB)
    • Bruce Bimber, Political Science, Center for Information Technology and Society (UCSB)
    • Yunte Huang, English (UCSB)
    • Wolf Kittler, Germanic Slavic and Semitic Studies (UCSB)
    • George Legrady, Media Arts and Technology/Art (UCSB)
    • John Mohr, Sociology (UCSB) Christopher Newfield, English (UCSB)
    • Lisa Parks, Film Studies (UCSB)
    • Carol Pasternack, English (UCSB)
    • Rita Raley, English (UCSB)
    • Matthew Turk, Computer Science (UCSB)
    • William Warner, English (UCSB)
  
  
  • Planning Conference (June 17-18, 2005)
    
    Extramural Conference Participants (to date):
    
    
    • Walter Bender (director of the MIT Media Lab)
    • Anne Balsamo (currently in the Interactive Media Division at USC, previously of Georgia Tech and Xerox PARC)
    • Adrian Johns (Univ. of Chicago historian and author of The Nature of the Book)
    • John Seely Brown (former director of Xerox PARC)
    • Paul Duguid (historian/sociologist of information and documents; Brown's co-author for The Social Life of Information)
    • Tara McPherson (USC Cinema-TV, founder of the Vectors journal at the USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy)
    • David Link (a digital artist in Germany, creator of The Poetry Machine installation)
    • Anne Pasual & Marcus Hauer of Schoenerwissen (creators of the "Txtkit" Open Source visual text mining tool for exploring large amounts of multilingual texts)
    • N. Katherine Hayles (UCLA English Dept.)
    • Christiane Paul (curator or new media art at the Whitney Museum)
    • Brigitte Steinheider (Psychology Dept., Univ. of Oklahoma, specialist in collaborative and interdisciplinary organizations and work processes).
      
      
  "Roundtable conversations" based on a series of defined questions that I would emcee—starting, for example, with general questions such as, "what is good reading today, and yesterday?" "why do we care about reading in the age of multimedia?" "what is new about reading in the age of the network?", and moving on to more specific questions such as, "what is industry doing for reading?" "how is human factors research or interface research helping us to read?" "How is Google or Amazon changing the nature of reading?" "what do new media artists think about reading online?" "does the study of earlier print culture offer lessons about new reading practices and technologies today?")
  
  
  • Grant proposal writing (2005-)