Transcriptions is created by a team of UCSB English Department faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students, and staff working in an environment of shared technology. Alan Liu is Principal Investigator of the project.
Charles Bazerman, Professor of English and Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is interested in the social dynamics of writing, rhetorical theory, and the rhetoric of knowledge production and use. His most recent book The Languages of Edison's Light is forthcoming from MIT press. His previous books include Constructing Experience, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science; The Informed Writer: Using Sources in the Disciplines; and Involved: Writing For College, Writing for Your Self. Current projects include a rhetorical theory of literate action and an investigation of environmental information. He is designing a Transcriptions course on "History of Written Culture."
Alan
Liu is a Professor in the English Department at the University
of California, Santa Barbara, where he has taught since 1988. He taught
previously in the English Department and British Studies Program at Yale
University. His central interests include literary theory, cultural studies,
information culture, and British Romantic literature. Currently his research
centers on a long-term project titled The Future Literary: Literary
History and the Culture of Information, the first half of which is
nearing completion as a book titled The Laws of Cool: The Cultural
Life of Information. His major web projects include: The
Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research and Palinurus:
The Academy and the Corporation--Teaching the Humanities in a Restructured
World. He is the originator and director of the Transcriptions project.
He teaches Transcriptions courses on "The
Culture of Information," "Hyperliterature,"
and "Theory of Postmodernism."
Christopher Newfield, Associate Professor of English
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, works in the fields of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature; literary and social
theory; and gender, sexuality, and race studies. He is currently working
on a book about corporate cultural studies entitled Business Futures.
His previous books include The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission
in America and two co-edited collections, After Political Correctness
and Mapping Multiculturalism. He will be teaching courses on "Business
Culture" and "Global California" for the Transcriptions
project. 
Carol Braun Pasternack is Associate Professor of
English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her areas of interest
include Old and Middle English literature; history of the English language;
oral and textual history; and gender in the Middle Ages. Her current project
is a book entitled Questions of Gender in Anglo-Saxon England.
She is the author of Textuality in Old English Poetry and co-ediotr
of Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages. She
is a strong proponent of collaborative instructional experiments and has
made the Web an important part of her recent Introduction to Literature
courses. She teaches Transcriptions courses on "Scroll
to Screen" and "The Imperial Text." 
Mark
Rose is Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University
of California, Santa Barbara. His areas of interest include Renaissance
literature, Spenser, Shakespeare, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and
legal and literary history in the Early Modern period. He is also an international
authority on intellectual property and copyright issues. His most recently
published major projects include his book titled Authors and Owners:
The Invention of Copyright, an edited collection of critical essays
on Shakespeare's early tragedies, and The Norton Shakespeare Workshop
CD-ROM. He will be teaching a course on the history of authorship
for the Transcriptions project. 
William Warner, Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, works in the following fields: the Enlightenment; the novel; the history of media culture from the eighteenth century to the present; and free speech and censorship. His most recent book is Licensing Entertainment: the Elevation of Novel Reading, 1684-1750. He is developing web sites that advance the cultural study of the history of media as well as the new digital media. He teaches a Transcriptions courses on "Techno-Gothic" and "Cyborg Genealogies."
The following graduate students are active or past research assistants
of Transcriptions. Research assistants participate in strategy meetings,
Web page creation, course preparation, and technical support. They are
active in both the intellectual and practical aspects of the project.
Robert
Adlington came to UCSB in 1999 from the University of Sussex,
England, where he received an MA in English with a special focus on
Critical Theory. His interests include Narrative, Memory, Spatiality
and "blissful" texts. He is Head of Database Design for the new English
Department website and is also a research assistant for Voice
of the Shuttle. He is the 2000-1 graduate representative on the
department's Technology Committee and has co-authored a Transcriptions
topic page on Celebrity
Caroline Brehm is a graduate
student in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, specializing
in the Early Modern English period. She has created a Transcriptions
topics page on "Hypertheatre."
Laurie Ellinghausen came to the University of
California, Santa Barbara, from Ohio State University in 1997 after
obtaining an M.A. in English with an emphasis on Renaissance literature.
In addition to writing about issues of early modern authorship and intellectual
labor, she wishes to employ information technology and digitized texts
for the creation and implementation of new approaches to teaching both
dramatic and non-dramatic early modern texts.
Robert
Hamm is a graduate student at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, working on the Early Modern period. He has coauthored a Web
site on Electrifying
the Renaissance: Hypertext, Literature, and the World Wide Web;
and he is also a research assistant for the Voice
of the Shuttle and the Univ.
of Californial Digital Cultures Multi-Campus Research Group.
Jennifer Hellwarth recently completed
her doctorate in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara,
specializing in Medieval and Early Modern English literature. Her dissertation
is titled The Reproductive Unconscious in Late Medieval and Early
Modern England. She is interested in using information technologies
to explore the transition from oral to textual cultures.
Jennifer
Jones is a graduate student in English at the University
of California, Santa Barbara, specializing in both nineteenth-century
British literature and contemporary culture of information. She is writing
a dissertation on the sublime and the virtual that hybridizes her research
on the Romantics/Victorians and the new millennium. She is also a research
assistant for Voice of the Shuttle.
Gisela
Kommerell is a graduate student in English at the University
of California, Santa Barbara. She has a special interest in information
theory and has created a Transcriptions
page on this topic.
Christopher Schedler recently completed his Ph.D.
in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara,with a dissertation
titled, Modernist Borders of Our America. His work will appear
in forthcoming issues of Arizona Quarterly, The Hemingway
Review, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. He
teaches a Transcriptions course titled "Weaving
Webs: Native American Literature, Oral Tradition, and Internet."
He also keeps a topics page
related to his course. After working with Transcriptions, he joined
the Metacollege.com firm.
Jeanne Scheper is a PhD
candidate in the Department of English, Managing Editor of Camera
Obscura, and a member of the shadow performance art group Cave
Dogs. She has written on the torch singer (and sworn technophobe)
Libby
Holman and is currently working on a dissertation entitled, "Moving
Performances: Traversing Trans-Atlantic Modernism, 1892-1940" that pays
special attention to disidentificatory performances that stage transvestic
moves, racial passings, and other unexpected cross-identifications.
She is interested in exploring the pedagogical uses of technology, and
in indulging luddite panic-technology fantasies..
Diana Solomon is a graduate
student in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She
has created a Transcriptions topics page on "Masquerade
and the Web."
Vince Willoughby
is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. He is currently completing his dissertation, entitled
The Other Revolution: Romantic Writings and Technology and will
be teaching at Georgia Tech University beginning in fall 2000. He is
the author of A Yellow Wood,
a website devoted to alternative careers for humanities PhDs commissioned
by the English Department at UCSB, and co-author of Romantic
Movements, a critical reexamination of space in the Romantic period,
with Sheila Hwang of UCSB. His scholarly interests include technology
in the romantic period, theories of technology, and postmodern criticism.
Jeen
Yu is a graduate student in English at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. She earned her B.A. in English in 1998 from
California State University, Los Angeles, and has research interests
in the Early Modern period. She wishes to explore intersections between
early modern print and contemporary information technologies. She has
created a Transcriptions topics page entitled "Cyber-scribes:
from Manuscript to Hypertext," with fellow early modernist
Mary Dudy, and is currently creating the Hypertext
Resources page for Transcriptions with Robert Adlington.
Undergraduate Research Assistants
Eric
Feay is the graphics and design specialist for the Transcriptions
project. He recently completed a double major in English and Philosophy
at the University of California, Santa Barbara. While taking a course
on literary theory from Alan Liu, he created a hypertext essay that eventually
became a well-designed online work titled "Hypertext,
or Anti-Linear Navigation." After that first experience with
online hypertext,he trained formally in Web design and multimedia authoring.
He is also creating a topics page for Transcriptions on the culture of
digital and online gaming. 
Karen
Whitney is the Computer and Network Technologist for the English
Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the
primary technical support specialist and system administrator for the
Transcriptions Project. She managed network and computer systems in private
industry in both Santa Barbara and Charlottesville, VA, before joining
the English Dept. staff in fall 1999. Immediately after arriving, she
concentrated on Y2K compliance, converting the English Dept. LAN to Windows
NT, and upgrading the department's servers and workstations. (Here is
a picture of
her office shortly after she began.) |
Before you start and after you finish working, make this one simple gesture toward your computer: Give it a nod. . . . For many of us, the computer is the means by which we earn a living. To give it a nod, then, is a way of thanking the tool for what it provides in life. It helps put bread on the table and a roof overhead. It gives us work and pleasure, exercises our minds, brings us information, connects us with other people. It is a partner helping us achieve our goals. Nodding also thanks the unseen hands and minds who helped create our machine. . . . (pp. 40-41) |
Here is a nod to the secret life of the project's technology.
This page created by Chris Schedler and Alan Liu for the Transcriptions Team, 1/26/99
(revised 11/12/00)
