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 I
took a leap of faith in 1994 and shifted the center of my
work from New Historicism and cultural
studies (originally focused on British
Romantic literature) to the theory and practice of contemporary
information culture. After studying the relation of literature
to history, it seemed inescapable to me next to think about
the relation of the humanities to that apparent antithesis
of history, "workplace 2000." What is the culture
of "knowledge work," "creative
destruction," "just-in-time," and "innovation"
in that workplace where so many of my students seemed headed?
And is there still a role for historical awareness—so
central to the humanities, so apparently unimportant in
"knowledge work"?
I started by creating a set of online
projects (beginning with the Voice
of the Shuttle in 1994) to bring humanities people to
the Internet. I worked to raise the general level of interest
and skills in information technology in my department
and the humanities at UC Santa Barbara (beginning with a
Web-authoring collective called the Many Wolves in the wild,
early days of the Web and continuing with courses,
programs,
and other more formal activities).
And I used these platforms of experimentation with information
technology to think my way toward a large-scale writing
project on The
Future Literary, the first part of which is currently
nearing completion as a book on The
Laws of Cool: The Cultural Life of Information.
The work has been engrossing, if also often by turns humbling
and tedious (a nadir was the week during which I spent several
full nights learning to set up and administrate a server).
I wonder if it is useful for a critic and theorist of literature
to study information culture at the gritty level of machines
and code, or whether I am simply throwing away my original
franchise (my standing and audience in the field of Romantic
literature and literary theory).
I wonder, that is, why, I am doing this. The work is of
such compelling interest and importance, though, and it
has such a tendency to unsettle and reconfigure the habitual
ways of working I had thought were endemic to the humanities!
I remember that when I first began working online in the
early days of the Web I felt a "wild surmise"
(like that in the Keats poem)—as if I stood on the
edge of something vast,
unknown, and perilous. Strangely, this was what once
started me on Romantic literature, too.
Finding a proper, fruitful way to ask "why?"
perhaps, is not the origin but the goal of any truly absorbing
work.
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Projects in
the Digital Humanities
- Voice of the Shuttle
(70+ pages of categorized and briefly annotated
resources for humanities research; also covers growth
areas where the humanities now intersect with other
disciplines)
- Transcriptions:
Literary History and the Culture of Information
(principal investigator) (NEH-funded curriculum
development project)
- Palinurus:
The Academy and the Corporation — Teaching
the Humanities in a Restructured World (resources
for thinking about the contemporarly overlap, and
differences, between academic knowledge and corporate
knowledge work; covers the history of higher education,
postindustrial business principles, information
technology in business and education, business and
education as seen in the arts, and recent controversies)
- Romantic
Chronology (co-edited with Laura Mandell, Miami
U., Ohio) (database-driven Web site that explores
how information technology can help map, or re-map,
the field of contextual understanding that constitutes
a literary "period")
- The
Laws of Cool: The Cultural Life of Information
(book-in-progress under contract with Stanford Univ.
Press on the history, sociology, and aesthetics
of information as an experience of culture within
the world of "knowledge work")
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Participant in
Other Information-Technology
Initiatives
- Digital
Cultures (U. California Multi-Campus Research Group)
(research initiative in which humanists and social
scientists from throughout the U. California system
collaborate on annual institutes, conferences, workshops,
and online events relating to the history and future
of information technology)
- UCSB Center
for Information Technology and Society (sponsors
research in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities
on the social impact of information technology;
promotes collaboration between the university and
industry in investigating the uses of information)
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Publications
on the Digital Humanities (excerpts
only unless otherwise indicated)
- "The Future Literary: Literature and the Culture
of Information" (forthcoming: The English Institute/Routledge)
- "Knowledge in the Age of Knowledge Work," Profession
1999: 113-24
- "The Downsizing of Knowledge: Knowledge Work and
Literary History," abridged version of a talk at
U. California, Berkeley, ed. Randolf Starn, Doreen
B. Townsend Center Occasional Papers, No. 15 (Berkeley,
Calif.: Townsend Center, 1998)
- "Globalizing the Humanities: 'The Voice of the
Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research'," Humanities
Collections 1, no. 1 (1998): 41-56
- "Sidney's Technology," solicited for a volume
of essays on "Narrative Theory Today," ed. Carol
Jacobs and Henry Sussman
- "Should
We Link to the Unabomber? An Essay in Practical
Web Ethics" (self-published Web essay,
Oct. 9, 1995; full document online)
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Courses on
the Digital Humanities
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See also Alan Liu's work
in Literary/Cultural Theory and
British Romantic Literature.
 ©2000,
Alan
Liu, English Dept., Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
(e-mail)
This page last revised 6/1/02
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