Class 5 (W., April 8) — The Rise of Literacy 

• Plato, Myth of Theuth on the invention of writing, short excerpt from Phaedrus
• Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), pp. 77-103  
  -- (alternative URL for archived version) | (plain-text archived version) 
• Alberto Manguel,
• "The Silent Readers", from his A History of Reading (1996)
•  "How Pinocchio Learned to Read", open-access version of essay from his A Reader on Reading (2011), read only pp. 1-9 

Class 6 (F., April 10) — Reading in the Information Age?

• Distracted Reading
• Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (2008)
• Paul La Farge, "The Deep Space of Digital Reading" (2016)
• N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (2017), pp. 9-14
• "Distant Reading" and Data Mining
• Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Lieberman Aiden, et al., "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books" (2011)    [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through the campus network or from off-campus through the UCSB VPN or Library Proxy server]
• Alternative sites/versions of the article: site 1 |  site 2 |  site 3 (figures at end of article in this version)  

Class 7 (M., April 13) — "Strange Books"

• Familiarize yourself with the following three artist's books (for a definition of "artist's book," see Wikipedia article):
• Agrippa: A Book of the Dead, an artist's-book created in 1982 by Kevin Begos, Jr., Dennis Ashbaugh, and William Gibson. The work is documented on The Agrippa Files, which was created by UCSB English Dept. faculty and students in 2005. 
      Read the following pages on The Agrippa Files site to learn about the artist's book. (Note: the site is useable without the Flash reader that some of its pages feature. Ignore the Flash features if you are not able to run Flash on your device.) :
• Introduction
• Description of the book and photos of selected pages
• Description and information about William Gibson's poem on the diskette in the book
• Also be sure to read the full text of the William Gibson's poem on the writer's official sit
• Shelley Jackson
• "Snow" (2014-) (poem written in the media forms of snow and Instagram) (Note: if you have an Instagram account, you can keep scrolling down to the beginning of the poem, but even without an account you can see enough to get a sense of the nature of the work.)
• Scott Rettbert and Shelley Jackson, "Room for So Much World: A Conversation with Shelley Jackson" (2019) (Read the first half of the interview related to "Snow")
• Danny Cannizzaro and Samantha Gorman, Pry (2014)
• Trailer video preview of Pry, a novel in the form of an Apple iOS app for iPad (Note: you do not need to buy the iOS app; it will be shown in lecture)

Class 8 (W., April 15) — The Communications Revolution & the Digital Principle

• Claude E. Shannon, "The Mathematical Theory of Communication," pp. 3-6 (1948) 
• Warren Weaver, "Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication" (1949)
• (Alternative site/version) 

Class 9 (F., April 17) — Computer Revolution (1): History of the Computer

• Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" (1945) (read the editor's introduction, and then sections 1 and 6-7 of Bush's article)
• Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (2003), pp. 13-36, 44-45
• Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (1996), pp. 233-58

Class 10 (M., April 20) — Computer Revolution (2): Rise of the Network

• Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (2003), pp. 283-97
• Richard T. Griffiths, "From ARPANET to World Wide Web" (2002)
• National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), "Beginner's Guide to HTML," Part I (2001)

Class 11 (W., April 22) — Computer Revolution (3): Emergence of Digital "New Media"

• Digital "New Media"
• Lev Manovitch, The Language of New Media (2001):
• pp. 18-48 (this starts at p. 30 of the PDF file: the section titled "What is New Media?")
• 218-28 (this starts at p. 134 of the PDF file)
• "Web 2.0"
• Tim O'Reilly, "What is Web 2.0" (2009), read only the first Web page of this article (which has a total of five Web pages)

Fiction Unit

Class 12 (F., April 24) — Fiction and Modern Media, Communication, & Information

• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) -- read at least to page 88 by today's class. (Print book; available at UCEN Bookstore and elsewhere)
• Help on the concept of entropy

Class 13 (M., April 27) — (Continued)

• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) -- finish rest of the novel. (Print book) 

Class 14 (W., April 29) — (Continued)

• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) -- finish rest of the novel. (Print book) 

Class 15 (F., May 1) — (Continued)

• Conclusion of lectures on The Crying of Lot 49
• Discussion with professor on the novel

During the COVID-19 virus situation, the midterm exam will be taken by students in online form through the GauchoSpace site for the course. The exam is designed to be 50 minutes long, but students will have a 60 minutes between starting the exam and submitting it (to allow for any delays or technical problems in the online test-taking process). The window of time during which students can start the timed, 60-minute exam will open at 8:00 a.m. and close at 8:00 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time on May 4th. (Special time affordances will be established for DSP students.) Watch for course announcements with further details as Professor Liu designs the online exam.

Class 16 (M., May 4) — [Midterm Exam]

• Exam on readings in the course to date to be taken on the course Gauchospace site here. The exam is primarily "factual," and is designed to reward students who have regularly kept up with the assignments and attended lectures and sections. See fuller description. (No blue books needed for exam.)

3. The Postindustrial & Neoliberal Age

      Information's Impact on Work and Power

Class 17 (W., May 6) — Postindustrial "Knowledge Work"

Class 17 Notes

• "Scientific Management" (The Original "Smart Work")
• Frederick Winslow Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (1911)
• Chap. 2; read only first 14 pages of the PDF.
• Excerpt on bricklaying
• "Knowledge Work" (Today's Smart Work)
• Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), pp. 82-84 (on "creative destruction")
• Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988), pp., 3-12
• Joseph H. Boyett and Henry P. Conn, Workplace 2000 (1992), pp. 1-45 
• Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline (1990), pp. 3-14

 

Class 18 (F,. May 8) — Neoliberal "Networked Society"

Class 18 Notes

• William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone, The Virtual Corporation (1992), pp. 1-19, 50-66, 184-205, 214-16
• Wendy Brown interviewed by Timothy Shenck, "What Exactly is Neoliberalism?" (2015)
• Manuel Castells, "Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the Network Society" (2000) (read only the abstract and the two sections titled "The Network Society: An Overview" and "Social Structure and Social Morphology: From Networks to Information Networks" on the pages numbered 9-17)

 

 Week 7

 

Class 19 (M., May 11) — Against All the Above

Class 19 Notes

• Early "Cyberlibertarianism"
• John Perry Barlow, "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (1996) 
• Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, "The Californian Ideology" (1996). (Optional: for fun, read Louis Rossetto, Rebuttal of the Californian Ideology, 1998)
• Critical Art Ensemble, "Electronic Civil Disobedience" (1996)  (read only the main essay, not the appendices) --alternative site that works in iOS Safari browser (the essay is the first chapter of the whole book by the CAE at this site]
• Jodi (network artist pair): home page. Click around and see what you can understand about this page and its subpages. (Info about Jodi)

 Update: Deadline extended to May 13 -- Assignment due by email to your TA by 11:29 pm, Pacific Daylight Time, May 11: Essay 2 on Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49

 

Class 20 (W., May 13) — (Continued)

Class 20 Notes

• Donna J. Haraway, Excerpts from "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1985), chapter 8 in her book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991)    -- The PDF contains the whole book. Read only following excerpts from the "A Cyborg Manifesto" chapter in the book:
• pp. 149-155
• pp. 161-165
• pp. 170-173
• p. 181 
• Continuation of above lectures, plus discussion with the professor.

 

 

 

Fiction Unit

 

Class 21 (F., May 15) — Fiction About Postindustrial/Neoliberal Work & Power

Class 21 Notes

• William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984), read half the novel by this class (Print book; available at UCEN Bookstore and elsewhere) 

 

 Week 8

 

Class 22 (M., May 18) — (Continued)

Class 22 Notes

• William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984), finish the novel. (Print book) 

 

Class 23 (W., May 20) — (Continued)

Class 23 Notes

• William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984), finish the novel. (Print book) 

If the COLA strike by TAs is still continuing at this time in the quarter, this assignment ("Spreadsheet on Being Human in the Age of Knowledge Work") will be optional instead of required. However, it is strongly recommended that you try doing it on your own because the assignment aids in the completion of the upcoming, last essay assignment in the course. (See the instructions for Essay 3 on the Assignments page.

Assignment due by email to your TA by 11:29 pm, Pacific Daylight Time, on May 20: Spreadsheet on Being Human in the Age of Knowledge Work

 

Class 24 (F., May 22) — (Continued)

Class 24 Notes

• William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984), finish the novel. (Print book)  -- Conclusion of professor's lecture on the novel.

  

 

 Week 9

 

[M., May 25 — No Lecture (Memorial Day Campus Holiday)] 

 

4. Processing Literature

      Information's Impact on the Way We Study Literature

 

Class 25 (W., May 27) — What is Text in the Digital Age?

Class 25 Notes

• William Warner, Kimberly Knight, and UCSB Transliteracies History of Reading Group, "In the Beginning was the Word: A Visualization of the Page as Interface" (View the original Flash animation for the best interactive access, or view the MP4 video version (or download the AVI or WMV video versions). On the original Flash page, click "Enter" and wait as the animation starts)
• Yin Liu, "Ways of Reading, Models for Text, and the Usefulness of Dead People" [PDF or HTML] (2013)
• Michael Witmore, "Text: A Massively Addressable Object" (2013)
• Wikipedia, "Markup Language" (read just for the main concepts, not the details)
• Alan Liu, "Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse" (2004) (read only pp. 49-57)

 Assignment due by email to your TA by 11:29 pm, Pacific Daylight Time, May 27: Essay 3 on Being Human in the Age of Knowledge Work

 

Class 26 (F., May 29) — Text Analysis and Literature

Class 26 Notes

• Ted Underwood, "Seven Ways Humanists Are Using Computers to Understand Text" (2015)
• Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, "A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method" (2012)  

 

 Week 10

If the COLA strike by TAs is still continuing at this time in the quarter, this assignment ("Text Analysis Exercise & Short Commentary") will be optional instead of required.

 

Assignment due by email to your TA 24 hours in advance of  section this last week of course: Text Analysis Exercise & Short Commentary

Class 27 (M., June 1) — Topic Modeling and Literature

Class 27 Notes

• David M. Blei, "Probabilistic Topic Models" (2013) -- (read only to end of p. 79, before the math begins)
• Ted Underwood, "Topic Modeling Made Just Simple Enough" (2012)
• Andrew Goldstone's interface for exploring topic models. The Signs model has some extra, later-developed features. Especially helpful in learning how to work with these models is the guide page on "Interpreting the topic model of Signs" 
• topic models of 100 years of literary criticism journals
• topic models of 40 years of the Signs journal of "Women in Culture and Society"

 

Class 28 (W, June 3) — Social Network Analysis and Literature

Class 28 Notes

• Wikipedia, "Social Networks"
• Stephen P. Borgatti,, et al. (2009), "Network Analysis in the Social Sciences"  [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through the campus network or from off-campus through the UCSB VPN or Library Proxy server] 
• (alternative non-paywalled source: pre-copyedited manuscript )
• Marten Düring, "Social Network Analysis for Humanists Cheat Sheet" (2015)
• Franco Moretti, "Network Theory, Plot Analysis," (Stanford Literary Lab Pamphlet #2, 2011)

 

Class 29 (F., June 5) — Conclusion: What Is Literature For in the Information Age? /
     What Is Information For in Literature?

Class 29 Notes

• The thought-prompts for this concluding lecture are the ideas of "deformance" and "glitch" in the literary/artistic use of information technology.
• Lisa Samuels and Jerome J. McGann, "Deformance and Interpretation" (1999) -- (read only p. 25-30, and also get a sense of the "deformance" experiments in section V, p. 36-45, and the appendix, p. 50-53) [alternate link]
  [paywalled; UCSB students have free access through the campus network or from off-campus through the UCSB VPN or Library Proxy server]
• Also available in an unpaginated HTML version (read on;y Sections 1-2 and the first four paragraphs of Section 3, and also get a sense of the "deformance" experiments in section V and the appendix)
• Mark Sample, "Notes Towards a Deformed Humanities" (2012)
• Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um)] (2011) (read pp. 7-32: "Introduction," "Glitch Manifesto," "A Technological Approach to Noise," and "The Perception of Glitch")    See also Menkman's site: http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com

 

---

During the COVID-19 virus situation, the final exam will be taken by students in online form through the GauchoSpace site for the course. The exam is designed to be 50 minutes long, but students will have a 60 minutes between starting the exam and submitting it (to allow for any delays or technical problems in the online test-taking process). The window of time during which students can start the timed, 60-minute exam will open at 8:00 a.m. and close at 8:00 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time on June 10th. (Special time affordances will be established for DSP students.) Watch for course announcements with further details as Professor Liu designs the online exam.

 

(W., June 10) — Final Exam

A 60-minute exam to be taken on the course Gauchospace site here. The final exam covers materials in the second half of the syllabus (since the midterm). See description. (No blue books needed for exam.)

Important late-breaking announcement about the final exam, which will be now a "no-fault" exam: see announcement. (The details were also sent to students by email.)
Date of announcement: June 3, 2020