Two sets! We just had the one, though of course (as I recall) supplement volumes would periodically arrive. Your photo of a set is exactly as I remember them on the shelf by the fireplace in my childhood home. Wish I had a picture of that set.
Volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia on two shelves of a library book case. This set of the encyclopedia is from 1990. (Photo by Nataev, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
For its newsletter edited by students, my English dept. asked faculty, staff, & grads for their favorite children’s book, "that one book that brought you so much joy as a kid.” Mine, I answered, was the World Book Encyclopedia. See why in this micro personal memoir! alanyliu.org/blog-essays/...
Blurbs for James Smithies' book, Digital Modernity: Why We Need to Think Historically About the Digital Age (2026). The text of the blurbs is as follows: <blurb1> Alan Liu, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara -- A sweeping view of how our digital age unfolds from the long history of modernity with all its tensions of determinism versus contingency, and Western universalism versus global multiplicity. Smithies's astonishingly broad, detailed, and interlaced knowledge of computation, philosophy, and history undergirds a powerful guiding message. </blurb> <blurb2> Katherine Bode, Professor of Digital Literary Studies, Australian National University -- Digital Modernity is an essential guide for anyone seeking to understand not just what digital technologies do but how they are deeply entangled in modernity's contested pasts and what they mean for our collective futures. </blurb> <blurb3> Peter Beilharz, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, La Trobe University -- The great contribution of James Smithies is to learn and to bridge the digital revolution and the tradition of critical theory and sociology. This is pioneering work, full of insight and provocation, addressing both text and context, opening up the pathways of understanding. </blurb>
Blurbs (including mine) for @jamessmithies.bsky.social’s book, Digital Modernity: Why We Need to Think Historically About the Digital Age. Glad to have been able to watch this book evolve during the past few years.
Abstract for James Smithies, Digital Modernity: Why We Need to Think Historically About the Digital Age (2026). Text reads in part as follows: “This is the first systematic theorization of digital modernity, arguing that the digital age cannot be understood apart from the long historical arc of modernity. Bridging digital humanities, critical theory, sociology, philosophy, and global history, Digital Modernity demonstrates that contemporary digital systems are continuations rather than ruptures of the modern project. It offers a robust conceptual framework for examining how technological infrastructures intersect with democracy, governance, colonial legacies, and the public sphere. Across nine chapters, the book moves from conceptual foundations to future-facing proposals. Topics include the cultural logic of Silicon Valley, digital colonialism, digital infrastructure, and the epistemic crisis of the digital public sphere. It also engages philosophical questions about emergence, historicism, and artificial intelligence. Drawing on applied digital humanities, the book rejects technological determinism while offering accessible accounts of computing’s technical and political histories. Readers benefit from a coherent theoretical lens that integrates history with socio-technical critique, enabling a clearer understanding of digital modernity’s present and future stakes. This book is intended for scholars and students across digital humanities, media and communication studies, science and technology studies, sociology, the philosophy of technology, and modern history. Its interdisciplinary scope also supports research and teaching in software studies, critical AI, infrastructure studies, and global modernities….”
Just published In open access: @jamessmithies.bsky.social’s book, Digital Modernity: Why We Need to Think Historically About the Digital Age, www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mon.... Abstract in screenshot.
Burton & @jorisvanzundert.bsky.social’s article is really superb.
We the Platform is available for preorder with the discount code CUP20 if you order directly from the press! cup.columbia.edu/book/we-the-... A thread on the argument below:
Collage of three views from Scott Kleinman’s DFR Browser 2 demo (which shows a 22-topic topic model of research articles on AI created by Alan Liu). At left ist the “grid” overview of the topic model in the form of 22 circles, each containing the top six most frequent words of a topic. In the middle is the “topic view” of a topic, showing: topic word distribution with weights; top documents containing the topic; topic proportion over time; year-based filtering; and word links to Word View. This particular topic’s top words are, in order, “students,” “learning,” “chatgpt,” “education.” At the right is the “word view” for the word view of a word in the topic model--in this case, the word “agents”. The word view shows: search bar for any word; topics where word is prominent; interactive visualization showing word context; and top words in each related topic.
Thanks to @skleinman.bsky.social for help creating the DFR Browser 2 visualizations of topic models in my kit, using his DFR Browser 2 reimplementation/extension of Andrew Goldstone’s original dfr-browser. Repo for DFR Browser 2: github.com/scottkleinma.... Demo: scottkleinman.com/dfrbrowser2/...
Here was the original call for the Modern Fiction Studies special issue on “Cutural AI”: call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/08/.... It’s actually become a double special issue, to appear in spring & summer 2027.
Screenshot of the opening two paragraphs in the main "readme" documentation of Alan Liu's "Kit for Exploring Articles on AI Published in 2024." The text in this screenshot reads as follows: <quote> This is a digital kit for exploring a collection of 553 journal articles published in English in 2024 that mention “artificial intelligence” or “AI” in their titles. These include the 227 “highly cited” such articles of that year in the Web of Science Core Collection index; and the 326 articles on AI in the Web of Science Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) (as listed on Feb. 15, 2025). The kit accompanies my article “AI Virtue: What is Good Knowledge in the Age of Artificial Intelligence?,” Modern Fiction Studies (forthcoming). The kit is thus focused on providing ways to study the language of epistemic values in discussions of AI (terms used to characterize and evaluate knowledge, and knowers—e.g., true, reliable, accurate, precise, nuanced, original, creative, and myriads of others). But the kit’s topic models and word embedding models can also be used to study other features of the article sets. </quote>
Screenshot of an interactive word-net visualization in my "Kit for Exploring Articles on AI Published in 2024." The word-net is a network graph whose blue nodes are “epistemic values” in the articles’ language about, or in the ambient discourse around, AI--that is, terms like “accurate,” “true,” “comprehensive,” “rigorous,” “useful,” “responsible,” and myriad others (both positive and negative) used to discuss and evaluate knowledge, and its knowers (people or machines), in the context of AI. Orange nodes connected by edges to the blue nodes (arcing lines linking nodes) show the nearest words to such epistemic values in word embedding models made by fine-tuning a pretrained embedding model on the corpora of research articles on AI that is the basis of the “kit.” The particular screenshot here shows part of the word-net of epistemic values in my “WoS Core” corpus of articles on AI (articles published in 2024 that the Web of Science ranks as “highly cited”). The part of the word-net shown centers on the blue nodes of “trust” and “creativity,” amid their nearest word-embedding neighbors. Simply lookng at the near proximity of “trust” and “creativity” in this word-net raises interesting questions, and this is even before considering the tangle of their nearest neighbors.
For an article I have in the coming Cultural AI issues of Modern Fiction Studies, I made a kit for exploring 553 research articles on AI published in 2024. The kit’s topic-model & word-embedding visualizations, & word-nets of epistemic values in discourse on AI are fun. alanyliu.org/citation/kit...
The “HLE” name for the benchmark was originally an acronym for “Humanity’s Last Exam.” But “humanity’s” here is not the same as “humanities.”
Figure 2 from Long Phan et al., “A Benchmark of Expert-Level Academic Questions to Assess AI Capabilities." The figure shows a graph like a jigsaw puzzle with puzzle pieces of various sizes indicating the proportion of questions in eight field categories for benchmarking. The categories are: Math (41% of questions), Physics (9%), Humanities/Social Science (9%), Engineering (4%), Chemistry (7%), Biology/Medicine (11%), Computer Science/Artificial Intelligence (10%), Other (9%).
Rigorous project to create the HLE benchmark for judging AIs on expert-level academic knowledge: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... But 41% of questions in benchmark are math, 9% humanities/social science (and similar % in other areas). Is there, or should there be, a bespoke humanities benchmark?
Thanks. The scientist vs. engineer issue, as it evolves within a humanities (and digital humanities) professional context, seems like it would be a great topic for a special issue of a journal.
The scientist vs. engineer (vs. humanist) problem could be another book topic for me. My dad (& every male of his clan immigrating to the US in the 1950s) was an engineer. I am a Romanticist who became a digital humanist. Where is DH on the STEM-to-humanities continuum? Is silicon my romanticism?
Among all the DH job calls I see, this one stopped me to think about what "humanities scientist" means in our shifting epistemic & institutional landscape in relation to other postdoctoral, alt-ac, & research software engineer (RSE) entry positions. "Scientist"vs. "engineer" (RSE) is interesting.
Screenshot of the poets' gallery in the SPARQL examples
The #RomanticPeriodPoetryArchive is officially in beta and open for testing! 🚀
We are modelling #GlobalRomanticism through the #SemanticWeb and your participation is encouraged and appreciated!
Explore the beta: www.romanticperiodpoetry.org
#Romanticism #19thC #poetry #DigitalHumanities
Manuscript of essay titled “Capturing the Signal in Public Humanities” about Publicscholarship.org by the site’s founder, N. Ángel Pinillos (forthcoming in _Public Humanities_ journal): drive.google.com/file/d/1L5u0...
Showing what scholars have to say in public language, media, and forms about any topic—with short AI-generated abstracts for each item—is an effective way to engage the public, students, and scholars themselves in the public humanities. publicscholarship.org
Extraordinary new public humanities resource that curates in near real-time over 50,0000 items from sources/channels of humanities-related scholars who create pubic-facing essays, podcasts, videos, blogs, etc.: publicscholarship.org
Ha! ❤️
It would be interesting to formalize and operationalize a “benchmark” for AI against a canon of “best,” and also “average,” Wikipedia articles based on some metric of best/average for delivering info with balance of depth, breadth, & efficiency. Does such a benchmark already exist?
I stumbled on the Wikipedia article on the “Rock Paper Scissors” game: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_pa.... Truly astounding page that could serve as a benchmark to assess LLMs. For example, ChatGPT is currently nowhere close in detail, theory, history, comparatism when prompted in any obvious way.
Banner of my old website showing, against a yellow background much like the color of office folders or manila envelopes, the site title "Nothing Transcendental: Alan Liu's Ad Hoc Site for Ordinary Business" and then the description: "Nothing transcendental occurs on this site. No conversion experiences, no life-changing thoughts, no expressions of deep feeling. All that happens on this site is ordinary and workaday. Here, the ordinary and routine business of professional life finds shelter from the pressure to be any more than it simply is." Included under this text in the banner are small screenshots of a word cloud and also a word net of terms related to the ordinary -- e.g.,, "ordinary," "common," "average," "standard," "temporary," "expected," "contingent," "casual," "tactical," "banal," "quotidian," and "nothing."
I have some affection, like for an old pet, for my “Nothing Transcendental: Alan Liu’s Ad hoc Site for Ordinary Business”—a tasksite for temporary, routine biz I kept: nothingtranscendental.pbworks.com Gathering synonyms for the “ordinary” in professional life for its word cloud & word net was fun.
Screenshot of text reading as follows: Forthcoming articles by Qiaoyu Cai • “Quantum Computing and National Allegory – Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy and the Question of Postsocialist Modernity” (forthcoming, Cultural Critique) • (Co-authored with Fabian Offert and Paul Kim) “Synthesizing Proteins on the Graphics Card: Protein Folding and the Limits of Critical AI Studies” (forthcoming, AI & Society)
![Screenshot of course description, with text as follows:
[Course title] Platforming East Asia from Print to Digital
[Description]
How has the digital revolution reshaped the creation and circulation of literature and other creative works in contemporary East Asia? Building on foundational theories of technology and media from scholars such as Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, N. Katherine Hayles, and Lev Manovich, this seminar explores how media-specific analysis has been taken up in recent scholarly work on China, Japan, and Korea, raising questions about how this research draws on classical media theories and develops locally inflected frameworks. We will examine how internet literature in China, Japanese cellphone novels, and Korean webtoons exemplify the platformization of creativity, situating these phenomena within broader conversations about social media, user-generated content, and emerging AI technologies. At the same time, we will look at earlier modes of literary production—such as newspaper serialization and mass-market anthologies—to understand what is new about digital-age platforms and how they transform relationships between authors, readers, and networks of circulation. Throughout the course, we will integrate comparative case studies and canonical theoretical frameworks to ask: What do these shifts in cultural production mean for how we study literature, technology, and society today?](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:focvijs2anjmlfqlrxcumphd/bafkreia3yrzkw5k2v4urx3433ze5b44i5nd5nf6okn2ccjrxerhrr6asnq)
Screenshot of course description, with text as follows: [Course title] Platforming East Asia from Print to Digital [Description] How has the digital revolution reshaped the creation and circulation of literature and other creative works in contemporary East Asia? Building on foundational theories of technology and media from scholars such as Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, N. Katherine Hayles, and Lev Manovich, this seminar explores how media-specific analysis has been taken up in recent scholarly work on China, Japan, and Korea, raising questions about how this research draws on classical media theories and develops locally inflected frameworks. We will examine how internet literature in China, Japanese cellphone novels, and Korean webtoons exemplify the platformization of creativity, situating these phenomena within broader conversations about social media, user-generated content, and emerging AI technologies. At the same time, we will look at earlier modes of literary production—such as newspaper serialization and mass-market anthologies—to understand what is new about digital-age platforms and how they transform relationships between authors, readers, and networks of circulation. Throughout the course, we will integrate comparative case studies and canonical theoretical frameworks to ask: What do these shifts in cultural production mean for how we study literature, technology, and society today?
Also: Qiaoyu Cai’s forthcoming articles, and the description of one of his courses on “Platforming East Asia from Print to Digital” (screenshots). See also the description and syllabus for his “The Cultural Life of Deep Learning” course, caiqiaoyu.org/teaching/.
Qiaoyu Cai’s article in Theory, Culture & Society on “The Cultural Politics of Artificial Intelligence in China,” journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10..... (Related to his 2025 dissertation on “A Tale of Two Cloud Polis: Neoliberalism, Postsocialism, and the Cultural Politics of Technology.”)
The contest, which is being run by Tsinghua University’s new Fangtang Institute for Critical AI and Foundational Innovation Studies, is being managed by my brilliant recent dissertator, Qiaoyu Cai (caiqiaoyu.org).
This is quite an interesting humanities & AI essay contest, with a large grand prize, for using AI as “intellectual partner” to write on the theme: “Will there still be myths in the age of AI?” Contest call: networks.h-net.org/group/announ...
Two copies of the book Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities on a coffee table next to a pair of sunglasses and a coffee cup that says “Not Fluffy”
Very happy to see this actual book in my actual hands (hat tip to global postal infrastructure)! With thanks to the editors @alanyliu.bsky.social @jamessmithies.bsky.social and Urszula Pawlicka-Deger.
My response to being named the Faculty Research Lecturer awardee at my university for 2025-26: liu.english.ucsb.edu/alans-respon.... Getting ready for my lecture for this on “AI Virtue: What’s “Good” Knowledge in the Age of Artificial Intelligence?” www.campuscalendar.ucsb.edu/event/frl-al...
Brilliant piece just out on “Inappropriate AI” by Colin Milburn & @ritaraley.bsky.social. A critique of higher ed’s legitimation quest for policies of “appropriate” AI use despite fact that LLMs are by nature inappropriate. They "appropriate" all edu and other materials. uchri.org/foundry/inap...
Abstract oil painting by artist Harry Rees in blue-gray and burnt-orange colors titled "Consensual Hallucination" (61 x 47 inches)
In the photo in my last post, the painting behind me in my dining room is one I own by artist Harry Reese, ccs.ucsb.edu/ccs-profiles...: a 61 x 47 inch oil work titled "Consensual Hallucination" in allusion to the canonical passage defining "cyberspace" in William Gibson's novel, Neuromancer.