Alan Liu PDF  | Print |  E-mail
Professor, English and Director, UC Transliteracies Project

Alan Liu researches and teaches the culture of information. His special focus is the relation between the humanities and the ethos of postindustrial "knowledge work" as the latter is assisted and allegorized by information technology.

UCSB has one of the strongest, deepest, and fast-moving cultures of interdisciplinary research and teaching in the nation. UCSB's research environment--in which projects form quickly around multiple humanities and arts departments or around innovative combinations of the humanities and arts with the social sciences, sciences, and engineering--has the feel of a "start up" company.

In the area of digital technologies, our English Department began by collaborating informally in the early 1990's with faculty and graduate students in the Art, Film & Media Studies, and other humanities departments, as well as with the social sciences and computer science disciplines (especially through the Center for Information Technology and Society). A history of shared conferences, courses, and programs led to formal collaborations in such projects as the Transliteracies Project on online reading that I direct, the new Social Computing Group that I participate in, the Bluesky graduate-student research group that I supervise (employing students in English, Comparative Literature, Film and Media Studies, Media Arts and Technology, Sociology, Communication, and Computer Science), or the Gateway Seminar for the Ph.D. Emphasis in Technology and Society in which multiple faculty regularly participate. In turn, such projects driven by flexible clusters of faculty and graduate students across disciplines have spawned a whole series of discrete team or individual projects, ranging from papers and books to websites, Flash movies (e.g., of the history of the book), and software application sketches.

Recently I taught a graduate seminar ("Literature+") in which teams of graduate students from across the humanities and other disciplines collaborated to build projects about literature using a variety of new software tools and online services. The premise was that these new tools--which all the disciplines now use in common--are symbolic of a broader, interdisciplinary initiative in society today.

Whether one goes on from a graduate program to enter academe, industry, government, a non-governmental organization, or some other profession, the premium is on people who are trained to work not just in their discipline but with others across disciplines. The future professor of English will need to know enough about text encoding, software protocols, social networking, and Web services to be able to plan and execute projects together with social scientists and engineers, just as social scientists and engineers will need to work with specialists in the creation, editing, and analysis of discourse. UCSB is heavily invested in such cross-disciplinary training.