Digital humanities and academic change

English Language Notes

Volumn 47, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 17-35

  Liu, Alan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 72949090455     PISSN: 00138282     EISSN: 00138282     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00138282-47.1.17     Document Type: Review

References (56)

1. Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004) 4
2. See Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980) 258-59
3. See also Leland De La Durantaye, "Kafka's Reality and Nabokov's Fantasy: On Dwarves, Saints, Beetles, Symbolism, and Genius," Comparative Literature 59 (2007): 315-31, retrieved 17 Jan. 2009, 〈http://complit. dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/59/4/315〉
4. An online copy of Nabokov's lecture on Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" can be found on Leni's Franz Kafka Page, 2000, retrieved 17 Jan. 2009, 〈http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vermeer/287/nabokov-s- metamorphosis.htm〉
5. The Voice of the Shuttle: Web Site for Humanities Research, ed. Alan Liu, created 1994, University of California, Santa Barbara 〈http://vos.ucsb. edu〉 (only the later, database-driven version is now publicly accessible)
6. Romantic Chronology, ed. Laura Mandell and Alan Liu, created 1995-1996, Miami University, Ohio/University of California, Santa Barbara 〈http://english.ucsb.edu:591/rchrono/〉
7. UC Santa Barbara English Department Web site, designed by Robert Adlington, Jeremy Douglass, Eric Feay, and Alan Liu, created 2000 〈http://www.english.ucsb.edu/〉
8. The Agrippa Files, general ed., Alan Liu, created 2005, UC Santa Barbara, 〈http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/〉
9. UC Santa Barbara English Department Knowledge Base (EDKB), ed. Ryan Boyd, Kimberly Knight, Marthine Satris, and Benjamin Shockey, created 2007, 〈http://wiki.english.ucsb.edu/〉
10. UC Santa Barbara English Department Second Life Campus ("UCSB Lane"), designed by Haru (Hyunkyung) Ji with Clayton Childress, Robin Chin, and Ron Robinson under the direction of Rita Raley, created 2007, 〈http://slurl.com/secondlife/Kerlingarfjoll/179/245/46〉. Projects started by digital humanists prior to the popularization of the Internet included an even earlier, no-Web stage of applications conceived primarily for standalone computers (e.g., early text-analysis or hypertext projects)
11. I have discussed team work as an ideal of the postindustrial workplace in Liu, Laws of Cool, esp. chapter 1, "The Idea of Knowledge Work." Cf. team production in the film industry or computer game design. Template pages are a component in an increasingly prevalent method of modern Web publishing: databases output their content into "templates" concocted from scripting code, which communicates with the database, and HTML formatting code, which presents material to the user. Such templates are essentially hollow molds for casting dynamically retrieved content. CSS stands for "Cascading Style Sheets," a method of augmenting and centralizing control over the formatting of Web pages
12. For the main Transliteracies Project, see 〈http://transliteracies. english.ucsb.edu/〉
13. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990)
14. Willard McCarty, Humanities Computing (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005)
15. Geoffrey Rockwell, "What is Text Analysis, Really?", Literary and Linguistic Computing, 18 (2003): 209-19
16. Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels, "Deformance and Interpretation" in Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave, 2001): 105-35 (available online at http://jefferson.village. virginia.edu/jjm2f/old/deform.html)
17. Stephen Ramsay, "Algorithmic Criticism," A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2007): 477-491 (available online at 〈http://www.digitalhumanities.org/ companion/DLS/〉)
18. The canonical, if early and still inchoate, definition of Web 2.0 is Tim O'Reilly's "What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software," 30 Sept. 2005, O'Reilly Media, Inc., retrieved 8 Sept. 2006, 〈http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/ 2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html〉
19. Wisdom of crowds is a catch-phrase of Web 2.0, in part owing to James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (New York: Doubleday, 2004). Rule of many, crowd-sourcing, hive-intelligence, etc., are other common ways of expressing the Web 2.0 belief that knowledge now flows bottom-up from decentralized myriads rather than top-down from elites
20. Funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the Credibility and Digital Media@UCSB Project at UC Santa Barbara (http://www.credibility.ucsb.edu/) is directed by Miriam Metzger and Andrew Flanagin, core members of the UC Santa Barbara Social Computing Group
21. An early experiment along these lines was the advance publication of McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard UP, 2007) in an online version called GAM3R 7H30RY (version 1.1, Institute for the Future of the Book, 2006, retrieved 26 Jan. 2009, 〈http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/ 〉). Developed by The Institute for the Future of the Book, GAM3R 7H30RY appeared in an adaptation of the WordPress blog platform called CommentPress that allowed readers to comment on specific paragraphs of the book
22. Readers thus created what amounted to local discourse communities around Wark's paragraphs, themselves more vignette-like or aphoristic in their local center of gravity than normative academic prose. (For an analysis of CommentPress with a screenshot from GAM3R 7H30RY, see Kimberly Knight, "CommentPress," research report for the Transliteracies Project, University of California, 7 May 2008, retrieved 26 Jan. 2009, 〈http://transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu/post/research-project/ research-clearinghouse-individual/research-reports/commentpress2#more-841〉)
23. In the discourse of Web 2.0, social graph is a peculiarly interesting term. It is an abstract, philosophical concept masquerading as a concrete, practical tool. Concretely, it is imagined as social network diagrams of the sort long known to sociologists (e.g., a diagram of nodes and links representing the pattern of relationships between people). The practical application is the visualization of "friend" networks, for example, on such social-networking sites as MySpace or Facebook. Abstractly and philosophically, however, social graph is the utopian dream of a universal social connectivity between all possible friends (and friends of friends) across different social networks and other arenas of online activity. This is especially the case whenever the notion is referred to as "the social graph," where the definite article has something of the messianic effect of "the One" in The Matrix movies by the Wachowski brothers. The dream is that logging onto the matrix of a social network will allow everyone to be "friends" with everyone, whether at one, six, or n-degrees of separation. On the idea of the social graph, see, for example, Brad Fitzpatrick, with David Recordon, "Thoughts on the Social Graph," 17 Aug. 2007, retrieved 19 June 2008, 〈http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/〉. I owe the phrase "social giraffe," and its poke at the overreaching idea of the social graph, to Pablo Colapinto, a PhD student in the UC Santa Barbara Media Arts and Technology Program. In 2008-09, Colapinto was the lead research assistant in the Bluesky subgroup of the Social Computing Group (for which, see n. 5 above)
24. Exceptions to the rule that academic organization cannot be thematized in humanistic inquiry include Evan Watkins, Throwaways: Work Culture and Consumer Education (Stanford, CA.: Stanford UP, 1993), and, more recently (among a fair number of other works about the conditions or institutions of academic work by humanists that have appeared in the last few years)
25. Christopher Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 (Durham: Duke UP, 2003) and
26. Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2008)
27. Transcriptions Project (Transcriptions: Literature and the Culture of Information), principal investigator, Alan Liu, initiated 1998, Department of English, UC Santa Barbara, 〈http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu〉. The Transcriptions Web site is now in transition to a new site for its rebranding as the Literature.Culture.Media Center
28. See 〈http://lcm.english.ucsb.edu/〉
29. Early Modern Center 〈http://emc.english.ucsb.edu/〉
30. American Cultures and Global Contexts Center 〈http://acc.english. ucsb.edu/〉
31. Literature and the Environment specialization 〈http://lit-environ. english.ucsb.edu/〉
32. Literature and the Mind specialization 〈http://mind.english.ucsb. edu/〉
33. English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), director, Patricia Fumerton, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara, initiated 2005, 〈http://emc.english.ucsb.edu/ballad-project/〉
34. Transliteracies Project (Transliteracies: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading), principal investigator, Alan Liu, initiated 2000, University of California Multi-Campus Research Group, 〈http://transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu〉
35. Journal of Transnational American Studies, University of California eScholarship Repository, sponsored by the UCSB American Cultures and Global Contexts Center and the Stanford University Program in American Studies 〈http://repositories.cdlib.org/acgcc/jtas/〉
36. Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS), UC Santa Barbara; see the center's home page, 〈http://www.cits.ucsb.edu/〉
37. For the National Science Foundation's Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program (IGERT), see 〈http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm- summ.jsp?pims-id=127598&org=NSF〉
38. For National Endowment for the Humanities grants focused on digital technology, see the NEH Office of Digital Humanities (〈http://www.neh.gov/ ODH/〉)
39. In regard to the MacArthur Foundation, see the foundation's Digital Media and Learning Competition (〈http://digitallearning.macfound.org/site/ cenJLKQNIFiG/b.3897207/k.95F0/Competition.htm〉)
40. For the UC Santa Barbara PhD Emphasis inTechnology and Society, administered by CITS, see 〈http://www.cits.ucsb.edu/education〉. For the UC Santa Barbara Social Computing Group, see n. 5 above
41. For my fuller thoughts on interdisciplinarity, see chap. 6, "The Interdisciplinary War Machine," in my Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008)
42. Cf. the kinds of phenomena that Franco Moretti incorporated into literary history through his "distant reading" method even before needing to explore further the new digital technologies (e.g., in collaboration with his digital-humanist colleague at Stanford University, Matthew Jockers). On distant reading, see Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005). My thanks to Matthew Jockers (consulting assistant professor in the Stanford University Department of English and also academic technology specialist at Stanford) for inviting me to sit in on one meeting of the faculty and staff research seminar on digital humanities he led at Stanford in fall 2006. Moretti was a member of the seminar. On the day I visited (5 October), I engaged with Moretti in stimulating to-and-fro about his methods after I had finished extemporizing about the digital humanities
43. Alan Liu, "Literature+," Currents in Electronic Literacy (Spring 2008), retrieved 19 Jan. 2009, 〈http://currents.cwrl.utexas.edu/ Spring08/Liu〉
44. Sir Joshua Reynolds, "Discourse III," Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (1959; rpt. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975)
45. Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996-1997). On the "power of identity," see esp. I: 22-25 and II (volume title: The Power of Identity)
46. See Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species (New York: Basic, 2002)
47. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1975) [orig. pub. 1942)
48. Grégoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine, Exploring Complexity: An Introduction (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1989)
49. John H. Holland, Emergence from Chaos to Order (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 1998)
50. Douglas Hofstadter and the Fluid Analogies Research Group, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (New York: Basic, 1995)
51. Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone, 1997)
52. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991)
53. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. enlarged (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970)
54. Alien, dir. Ridley Scott, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1979
55. On companion species, see Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm; Bristol: University Presses Marketing, 2003). I adopt the term "allogenesis" from an untitled talk by Marcos Novak on "transvergence" and "allogenesis" in the Digital Media Arts Lecture Series at the University of California, Santa Barbara, 4 Mar. 2002
56. Alan Liu, "Imagining the New Media Encounter," A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2007): 3-25; also available online at 〈http://www. digitalhumanities.org/companion/DLS/〉