The first set of English books a young Alan Liu owned were the Tom Swift books for children, targeted for young boys who were interested in gadgets of different kinds. He came by the interest honestly. An immigrant to the U.S. who arrived at age five from Hong Kong, Liu was born into an especially technologically focussed family. ‘My dad was a structural engineer and every one of my male relatives of his generation came over to the U.S. as an engineer of some sort – we had electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, industrial engineers.’ And, as an undergraduate, Liu was on course to join this cohort of science-minded Lius.
But this is the story of an English Professor, who had a ‘secret life in technology’ that is, before the internet landed: ‘when the World Wide Web came along circa 1993 or thereabouts, there was this little light bulb that went on in my head and it occurred to me that there was a way that I could bring my interest in literature and my interest in technology together in a common pursuit both in teaching and in research.’ During our interview I was on a mission to find out the details of this joined-up thinking and to discover what the implications have been for Liu’s pedagogical approach to teaching English.
Liu spoke to me from southern California, where he is a Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He had just dropped his teenage daughter to school in what I imagined to be glaring sunshine, while at my end, I sat bundled up in the gloomy afternoon chill typical of London in winter. Liu spoke in a measured voice that belied a passion for teaching our subject and exploring new avenues for pedagogy occasioned by digital technologies. His many publications include Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford UP, 1989) and The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (University of Chicago Press, 2004), and he is the editor or principal investigator for several major digital initiatives such as the Voice of the Shuttle: Webpage for Humanities Research (VOS).
After receiving his Ph.D. in English from Stanford University, Liu began his teaching career in 1979 at Yale University, moving on in 1988 to UCSB. That switch from an elite, East Coast institution to the state run University of California precipitated a major shift in Liu’s approach to teaching. ‘The UC system is part of a large system that is fed laterally by the community college system so, nearly 40 to 50 percent of our students come in after their second year from the community college. Because of that, the experience here isn’t exactly the tight, gathered, four-year, intense liberal arts education that it was on the east coast at a private university. We have a lot more students who come in for a quarter or so (ten weeks) and then go out and work again, so it is a much more diffuse, modular kind of experience.’ Some of the correlative effects of students who are often working up to 40 hours a week will be familiar to UK lecturers: Liu finds his students have a lot less time to do the reading he assigns. ‘And’ he adds, ‘because some students are poor, I am finding and I think my colleagues are finding too that strangely enough there is a decreasing number of actual texts in the classroom. So it is increasingly hard to say to students to ‘turn to page 50’ of a particular text when they don’t have the text in the class. Or in some cases they are actually so poor that they buy one text and turn it in for a refund and then buy the next text with that money. So there is a declining base of what one can assume students have accomplished when they come to an actual class.’
‘The other part of this’ Liu continued, ‘is that there is less of a common sense of a literary background or a background to other disciplines, so there is less of a knowledge that one can assume students have in common. Partly as a consequence of that, I think that my teaching has changed since I moved to the public university system; I’ve become much more aware of how carefully one needs to think through and manage the introduction of a text into a meaningful context for the students. So rather than saying turn to page 50, for example, one needs always to, in some way, perform in class, the text or passage, or have a student perform it, within a context that one has very carefully set up, narrating a scenario or drawing an analogy to some piece of popular culture or some current event that gives the particular passage rich and resonant meaning semi-autonomously of a larger fixed cultural background one might have assumed students to have.’
"Our students are not less literate today but they do spend less time in books and more using media of different sorts"
What does this actually become in practice I asked, curious as to how lecturers might tap into the popular cultures of our students? Liu did not miss a beat, recalling a course he taught while researching The Laws of Cool, part of which is about the popular cultural sensibility or aesthetic of cool in its relation to broader currents in the workplace and the world. While Liu might have relied upon the book Subculture, by his colleague Dick Hebidge, to make the topic meaningful to his students, instead he drew on the news of that particular month which happened to be the fatal shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. ‘I asked the students about the style or dress of the two student gunmen – they were dressed in a kind of a Goth style, in trench coats and so on. This led to an interesting discussion about the function of style, of subcultural kinds of behaviour, and moved on from clothes and it turned into an open discussion about the nature of evil. When I asked why was doing this bad? What are the grounds for thinking through ethics in the modern world? There was a pause and I remember one student said to me, ‘Because it’s not cool.’ A wonderful piece of contemporary adolescent slang which is either completely fl at in effect or profoundly deep and moving, depending on how it is read and in what context it is read. That is an example of building a meaningful context that students can latch onto whether it is a student who has prepared well and read the text or whether it is a student who is somewhat behind when they come to class.’
Liu is clearly a teacher who has thought carefully about how to resolve the tensions of how and when he was taught and the very different proposition facing him as a teacher today. While community college, state-educated students were not plentiful at Yale and Stanford in the seventies, other social trends are also transforming higher education, trends in what Liu identifies as ‘the media habits or media practices’ of today’s students. ‘Our students are not less literate today’ asserts Liu, ‘but they do spend less time in books and more using – often in very intelligent although not fully articulate ways – media of different sorts and of course, lately, much of that media is digital in one way or another. I’ve actually had students tell me, ‘professor you know that page is awfully hard to read, you know it is all grey text,’ which means that our students are a little bit more attuned these days to pages of texts that have graphics on them, illustrations, animations, sometimes sound backgrounds…there is a lot more competition, in other words, in the media ecology around texts than there has been in the past.’
These forms of new media practice and literacy do not affect students in isolation. Liu spoke of the good teachers he had at Yale and Stanford who were equally concerned with building meaningful contexts around the passage or couplet to be discussed. ‘What’s different’, Liu reiterated, ‘is that they could depend upon that meaningful context being one that could be brought out of a text; they could point to other parts of a text and very carefully tease out the world of the author or of the text and identify what makes a particular word or sentence significant.’ Of course Liu has himself been affected by new media practices, by the inner technology boy living inside him from his youth: ‘I am finding myself now,’ Liu confesses, ‘that texts introduced purely by themselves without a lot of work preparing the students are a little bit more inert. I don’t think I am alone as a teacher in increasingly drawing upon media parallels or analogies of different sorts even if one has not thought this through or does not ‘work’ with media… so many of my colleagues draw, for example, from popular film or from music, to display something into discussion in the proper way.’ I could only agree with Liu here, thinking of all the times I screened a film or played a music track in order to get my students into a more comfortable yet critical ‘zone’ with a text.
I understood that Liu’s professors in the 1970s could be sure that there was a text in the classroom, and they taught close reading and historical context accordingly. And Liu, in between Romantic poetry, hankered after the flickering computer screen. But I was still unclear about how this Wordsworth scholar became the doyen of the digital humanities universe or even how the young Liu had diverged from the path set by his male elders. With a soft chuckle he tells me what he calls ‘the most successful narrative’ of these rather organic transformations connecting ‘the Romantic and information culture poles’ of his career.
" Part of me thinks this is a fool's errand that I am engaged upon. What was I thinking, that I could create a site essentially solo that would register the humanities for the internet age?"
‘When I started my career, 1979 through 1989, when my first book on Wordsworth appeared, that was a generation that was involved in trying to find new ways to recapture the relationship between literary texts on the one hand and historical contexts on the other. So I was a part of New Historicism within the Romantic field. It is that interest in historicity or historical awareness that has steered through to my current work on contemporary culture and its relationship to information. It’s very much the case that I am thinking through issues having to do with the relationship between historical awareness and media literacy today. I am fascinated by an information universe in which information seems to last exactly one second before it disappears from the radar scope of relevancy.’ Yes, but isn’t that jumping ahead of the story? What about that corps of engineers otherwise known as his family – how did they react when he told them, actually, he wanted to do literature? ‘They took it very well. The great change took place midway through my undergraduate career at Yale, when I had to carefully rehearse in my mind how I was going to go home on the train and tell my dad I was switching from a chemistry major to an English major. I still remember the answer he gave me (all my fears were unwarranted) ‘whatever you choose is fine, it’s just that in my experience, the only good profession is the one you can take across the border with you.’ He was concerned that training in a particular language, in literature, was not going to give me that global currency that someone of his generation needed to hop across the border. It’s a very interesting perspective on what we call today the global economy.’ And what exactly was it in his undergraduate career that made Liu switch from chemistry to literature? ‘I was just more absorbed with my literary study. I enjoyed it more, and frankly I was better at it.’
Pulling back from the personal and returning to the public context, Liu is lukewarm about the whole idea of the digital divide at least in terms of the inequality often laid at its doorstep. He agrees that gender along with race, ethnicity and class are all ‘issues’ in the digital humanities, but, he argues, ‘it doesn’t seem to me clearly to map on to a natural digital divide, between, for example men and women.’ In academia he has observed the opposite in many cases: he sees digital media and digital studies as working as an equalizer between, for instance, institutions with world-class print libraries and those without. Liu was keen to point out that in his own experience ‘digital archives and collections have been one of the drivers for those without to be among the first to invest heavily in digital humanities kinds of work. One of the great reasons a university like ours, Santa Barbara, which is not the top of the system here, (we’re not Berkeley or UCLA), became interested in digital media early on was that my colleagues saw this as a way to develop a special access to knowledge that would not compete with but would be something different from having a worldclass university.’
‘The interesting wrinkle in all of this right now is that since about 2001 or so, what they are calling Web 2.0 has started up. I will be saying more about that in my talk when I come out there in July—the world of blogs and wikis and social networking and so on. The nature of that technology is such that the trend line is towards a levelling of the playing field. One no longer necessarily needs a high degree of technical mastery or to invest in one’s own database or server-based resources, in order to be able to contribute quite substantially to a database that is being kept elsewhere online. I myself think this trend-line is going to be promising if we can turn it to the advantage of the universities.’
‘Right now in the Web 2.0 world there’s a long-standing controversy about a different kind of digital divide—the gap between on the one hand, expert knowledge and the knowledge of the ‘folk’ as they call them in the neologism folksonomy. Some of the controversies that have been raging around Wikipedia have to do with how and whether experts should be involved as opposed to the lay person creating knowledge. I think one of the hot research topics for the future – but a curricular issue as well – is how socially and technologically to invent the apparatuses that will allow experts and the ordinary folk to contribute intelligently together to the building of knowledge resources in ways that complement each other. That is something I am very interested in.’
Prompted to discuss these ideas in tangible curricular terms, Liu described a course he ran last year that was designed completely inside a wiki, using the same software that powers Wikipedia. ‘I asked the students to be a production team with me, to design the organization of the site, to create the content for the site, to do the research for the site, to use these new technologies – in other words to blur the line between being a consumer and a producer of knowledge.’
"I am fascinated by an information universe in which information seems to last exactly one second before it disappears from the radar scope of relevancy."
Having established the trajectory of Liu’s journey from chemistry to literature major, from New Historicist Romantic to digital humanities, there was but one area left to question—the origins of his very first website, which again takes him back to the beginnings of the World Wide Web. ‘The Voice of the Shuttle (VOS) started in mid 1994, when I started to keep, essentially, a bookmark list for myself. I decided to open it up and share it with my colleagues – I was like one of those people out in a street alley saying pssst, come over here, look at what I got! [laughter] But soon after that, my university’s humanities division acquired its first server and actually had no ‘top of the hierarchy page,’ and since I had a page they asked me if my page could serve that function for a while and that’s how it was released to the world. As with all internet work, one thing led to another, or rather one thing led to a million others, and the site grew. My concept for it was that it would be a kind of a university bookstore organized in the way of academic research and the way that disciplines are organized relative to each other, historically and otherwise because the organization of that knowledge in and of itself has value as a supplement to a general social knowledge. One of the lessons I have really learned from VOS is that although it is organized academically and targeted for a scholarly community, the lay person seems to find value in it. It is a kind of teaching tool about how things are related to each other from the perspective of the scholars who have spent a lot of time thinking about these issues. Over the years the site grew, mostly as a solo effort, but occasionally I had some grant money that would allow me to hire students to help me with the site.’
There is a hint of despondency in Liu’s voice as he begins to catalogue recent, continuing and increasingly malicious hacker attacks to VOS, which sometimes shut down his ability to edit it for months at a time. ‘Not being a corporation,’ he explains, ‘and depending partly upon student goodwill and the goodwill of programmers who have this kind of knowledge, it is not the case that I can instantaneously ‘harden’ the site or do the kinds of work that a major corporation would be able to do. So much of my energy has gone into worrying about issues like that instead of directing it into the knowledge of the actual content there.’
It seems to me that in creating online environments in the public domain and in introducing and working alongside his students in the classroom to harness new technologies for the purposes of humanities, Liu has been ahead of the curve in terms of the ways technology is changing our classrooms. He leads by example in showing us we can shape technology to the uses we prioritise and require rather than, as he has written about, just having to take what ill-fitting software gets tossed our way from the corporate world. It also seems to me that Liu’s reputation as a ground-breaking figure is well-deserved. Why then can’t he get the needed infrastructure support – funding, staff, etc. – to stave off the sort of attacks suffered by the VOS site? Mightn’t such a lack of support have a deadening effect on other people trying to do similar work, for surely if an established expert Professor can’t get support how will anyone else? But Liu is characteristically well-ahead of me – he has already theorized this idea. He agrees with me, audibly sighing, and yet quickly pushes despondency away and sees the core of the very diffi cult work he has embarked upon:
‘One sharpens one’s perspective on what is proper to a university teaching environment. Those are environments which are very good for experimenting with and putting out prototypes for knowledge. So Voice of the Shuttle is like that, the wiki class with my students is like that, but they are not environments that are very good for turning out production quality, hardened, super effi cient products of different kinds. That requires capitalization and staffi ng at a level beyond not just what a university is capable of but beyond what is good for a university, which needs to move on to new areas of knowledge and to move its students along. Part of me thinks this is a fool’s errand that I am engaged upon. What was I thinking, that I could create a site essentially solo that would register the humanities for the internet age? That seems now like a foolish quest.’
It is not a foolish quest, of course, and we owe Liu a debt of gratitude for seeing the possibilities of cross-fertilising humanities subjects and technology. ‘I really want the knowledge to be invested in our students,’ he declares. ‘I want them to be behind the scenes and see what’s involved in running this technology and to bring that knowledge back into their core work. To use technology not just as an instrument serving humanities skills but to bring the knowledge of technology into what we think of as the humanities, the way we think about the world today, the problems and topics we take up, and the pedagogic approaches we design.’
So what lies ahead for Alan Liu? As mentioned above, he will be visiting England in July to be a plenary speaker at the Subject Centre’s Renewals Conference. During his visit he is looking forward to fi nding out what the differences are in the UK setting for education in general but also within information technology and the humanities. Beyond that, he says with a matter-of-fact modesty, ‘I am ultimately interested in and I hope to eventually write about how forms of literary imagination have absorbed us in generations past and how they can contribute to and enrich the similar forms of imaginative engagement that are at work in the media world today. I am very interested in the topic of simulation, for example. How exactly is it that the imagination is at work in simulated or virtual kinds of environments?’ For our part, we can wonder at the real, rich, not virtual imagination of Liu himself, nurtured unwittingly, many years ago by a character called Tom Swift.
