Alan Liu

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?

Rock paper scissors - Wikipedia

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?

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/.

The Cultural Politics of Artificial Intelligence in China - Qiaoyu Cai, 2025 This essay examines the cultural politics of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in China through the lens of postsocialism, proposing the concept of a ‘postsocialist ...

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.”)

Qiaoyu Cai Technology, Culture, & Politics

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...

Inappropriate AI Colin Milburn and Rita Raley (AI Paradigm 5/5) explore AI's appropriative processes.

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.

Alan Liu cradling in his arm five copies of the paperback edition of Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities while standing in front of a painting against the red wall of his dining room. The painting is a large, abstract oil work in blue-gray and burnt-orange colors by artist Harry Reese; it is titled "Consensual Hallucination" in allusion to the canonical passage defining "cyberspace" in William Gibson's novel, Neuromancer.

Physical copies of our Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities book (newest volume in Debates in DH series) arrived today just in time for the holidays! www.upress.umn.edu/978151791608... @uminnpress.bsky.social

We’re doing it, y’all!

Starting this spring @skeuomorphpress.org will sponsor a "Media Necromancy" speaker series—each talk will "unearths what @alanyliu.bsky.social describes as 'the déjá vu haunting of new by old media'"

Hoping for skeuomorphic talks about a range of time periods/locations/&c.+

Thanks, Steve ;)

To my knowledge, alt-text is plain text only. No italics & other formatting or HTML rendering—in great part because that defeats the purpose of alt-text for enabling vision-impaired readers to use screen reader devices, etc. So my underscores were improper.

Thanks! Is “Bildbeschreibung” the standard German for “alt-text” in a digital/technical context?

So many great pieces in this volume. Can’t wait to see it out in the world!

It’s exciting to see this long-running project, that evolved after formative conversations in Aotearoa New Zealand many years ago, coming to fruition.

So thrilled to be a part of the important volume. The “critical” in “critical infrastructure” describes an analytical disposition but I think it also gestures at the sense of something crucial that shapes so much of what is possible in the digital worlds we inhabit.

I think my improvised alt-text for the book cover captures well our book's general, collective spirit toward the idea/practice of infrastructrure. The tension between systematicity & what lies beyond the system is what powers the 1st word in our title: Critical Infrastructure Studies and DH....

Cover of new book in the U. Minnesota Press Debates in DH series: _Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities_, eds. Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies. The book cover shows the title of the book in large, upper-case-only, sans-serif block letters (colored yellow for "Critical Infrastructure Studies" and red for "Digital Humanities") against a diagonally tiled, grey background with a drawn, shaded texture suggesting concrete. The overall visual effect is of text stenciled on a concrete wall in an urban infrastructural environment whose brutalist modern style has been given nuance in two ways. First, the architect has qualified the heavy-handed systematicity of modernism through the decor of slightly irregular tesselation (the tiles are of several shapes in an overall geometry whose system is unclear and unpredictable). Then it is as if some street artist or street theater group has come along and stencil spray-painted a poster for their improv event over the building wall.

I had fun writing alt-text for this image of the cover of the new _Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities book (in Debates in DH series) I co-edited. See alt-text of the image. (Book description & contents here: www.upress.umn.edu/978151791608...) @uminnpress.bsky.social.

Honored to appear in this fantastic book with a short piece on “solidarity infrastructure” in digital humanities, co-authored with @miriamposner.com

Screenshot of page 52 University of Minnesota Press Spring 2026 catalog, showing the book cover, description, and contributor names of the new book in the Debates in DH series (ed. Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies) titled _Critical Infrastructrure Studies and Digital Humanities_. The text of the description reads as follows: How digital humanities can shape and be shaped by the infrastructures that sustain our world. _Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities_ reimagines the digital humanities (DH) through the expanding field of critical infrastructure studies. Featuring voices from around the globe, this volume explores how DH builds on and extends theories and technologies of infrastructure that affect society, culture, and knowledge in different national and regional contexts. Examining DH’s own infrastructural genealogy, the contributors offer readers critical reflections and bold visions for the future as they address issues of environmentalism, decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty, multilingualism, labor justice, feminism, national development, and beyond from a variety of disciplinary perspectives embedded in concrete digital systems. Including innovative “infrastructure manifests,” the essays in this book illuminate how DH can both study and shape the systems that sustain culture, scholarship, and connection....

U Minnesota Press's Spring 26 catalog, listing our new Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities (in Debates in DH series), eds. Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, @jamessmithies.bsky.social): z.umn.edu/spring26. Table of contents: www.upress.umn.edu/978151791608... @uminnpress.bsky.social

Screenshot of email sent by Alan Liu to Alina Tugend on Nov. 6, 2025. Text of the email reads: "Dear Alina, I finally had a chance to read your piece on "Building a Thriving Humanities Program." I just wanted to send you a note expressing my admiration of it. It's terrific longform reporting grounded on superb research from all over the nation. The piece is just bristling with reports on innovative programs and curricular revisions in the humanities elsewhere, but is framed in a way that brings a unifying perspective to it all so that the sum of the efforts seems like more than panicked humanities people throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. All the tactics, in your writing up of them, suggest broader strategies. Kudos to you."

Fan letter I wrote to journalist Alina Tugend for her “Building a Thriving Humanities Program,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 25, 2025, www.chronicle.com/report/licen.... (A non-paywalled PDF here: www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/cor... )

Like many DH colleagues, I've been testing the vibe coding waters. As a case study, I ended up re-engineering Andrew Goldstone's dfr-browser for exploring topic models. github.com/scottkleinma... It has a bright new look, a lot of new features, and it's hopefully easier to use. +

Thanks, Neil. Greetings after all these years!

In general, though, Fellou is a work in progress. It definitely needs better reporting on when/why a complex job fails, & on what deliverables are recoverable. And it's really frustrating that it doesn't return credits when a job fails. I ended up opting into a paid plan to get complex jobs done.

During a job, Fellou.ai deposits interim or in-progress deliverables in the following path on a Windows machine. You might look there for what's left behind after a failed job. C:\Users\[user_name] \AppData\Roaming\Fellou\FellouUserTempFileData

Also particularly impressive about asking ChatGPT to revise my prompts for Fellou is that I ended up with prompts that required results to be returned with higher data quality (in a taxonomy & data schema formatted in JSON; deduplicated; names standardized on canonical names, etc.)