@alanyliu.bsky.social
I'm a professor in digital humanities & English at UC Santa Barbara. For public humanities, I founded http://4Humanities.org & co-founded https://center-humanities-communication.org/. My website: https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/
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.”
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.
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.
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 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)
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...
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...
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.
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....