Career
Alan Liu was faculty at Yale University from 1979 to 1987,before moving to the University of California,Santa Barbara in 1995.
In 1994,in the early days of the internet,Liu started Voice of the Shuttle (VoS),a "Web page for humanities research," which indexed humanities-related content on the internet before that content was made easily discoverable via search engines. [5] Liu writes that in 1994,his intent was to "seduce my community onto the Internet." [5] It began as a local project that grew to global prominence,logging "sizable user communities from Italy,Australia,NewZealand,Japan,Mexico,and several other countries (plus a constant stream of first-time visitors from all over)." [5] This led to "mirror" sites emerging in numerous other locations. [5] [6] It would later be recognized in the popular press,including Forbes,Los Angeles Times,New York Times,and others. [5] In 1996,Steven Henry Madoff of in The New York Times noted that VoS was "an astonishingly deep resource,covering every aspect of the art world." [7] Liu would later call this project a "boundary object," as theorized by Susan Leigh Star,and write of it:"It was a sunrise,and sunset,boundary object spanning disciplinary and geographical scholarly communities in hopes of creating a global collaborative in which humanists (and the public) could freely take and add knowledge across their divisions." [5]
In 2005,he founded the Transliteracies Research Project,an early example of a multi-campus digital project,which examined the evolution of reading and reading technologies. Suzana Sukovic writes that the concept of "transliteracy" as employed in the digital humanities was based on the work started by Liu and the Transliteracies Project. [8]
Also in 2005,Liu established The Agrippa Files,a digital project that sought to create an online archive of William Gibson's ephemeral art book Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) . According to Lisa Swanstrom,this project marked a significant moment in the afterlife of the original Agrippa. [9] Quinn DuPont,who later ran a challenge to crack the code of Agrippa, notes that this project demonstrated the potential of cryptography within digital humanities. [10]
Since then,Liu has become a prominent figure in the field of digital humanities. His scholarship has been foundational to the field,and important in critiquing it as it has become more institutionalized. Stephen Ramsay summarizes Liu's criticism of the field made in his famous essay,"Where is the Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?" as demanding "that digital humanities develop a sense of awareness and self-reflection about its own activity using the existing frameworks of critical theory and cultural studies." [11]
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