NEH Proposal, 1996

Summary Narrative Rationale Content and Design of the Project Curricular Resources Web Site Pedagogical Innovations Possible Interdisciplinary Program Institutional Context Evaluation Project Staff and Participants Follow-Up and Dissemination

The following is the slighted-edited narrative portion of the original NEH proposal submitted by Transcriptions in 1996. Particulars of the project have since changed to adapt to available funding and other exigencies. [Updates entered in brackets below indicate the most critical differences.]

1. One-Page Summary

The "TRANSCRIPTIONS: Literature and the Culture of Information Project" at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) is a three-year, phased curricular development and demonstration project that dedicates the considerable strength of the campus in cultural studies (especially in its English Department) to making information technology a conceptual and practical bridge between the humanities and the culture of information. The project demonstrates how this bridge can be built by simultaneously humanizing information technology and, reciprocally, reconfiguring the humanities in informational and technological terms.

Centered initially in the UCSB English Dept, the project's development group (six methodologically and historically diverse English Dept. faculty experienced in developing/implementing instructional information technology; teamed with graduate-student research/teaching assistants and undergraduate research assistants) will create a twofold curricular structure centered on the combined thematic/practical use of the World Wide Web. Along one track, the project will extend existing courses and develop new ones in the areas of postmodernism, postindustrialism, globalism, mass culture, media history, intellectual property, theory of technology, and online culture--i.e., the related contexts that now make information such a powerful paradigm. Along the other track, it will extend and develop courses in the history and theory of orality, literacy, manuscript culture, early print culture, history of the book, the ideas of the archive and library, the technology of the canon (e.g., publishing history), the history of literature as an academic discipline, the evolution of copyright, etc.--i.e., the related contexts that have always made literature itself an "information technology" (or what a recent movement in literary interpretation calls "materialities of communication"). Course modules developed in both tracks will make extensive use of the Web as both a topic of discussion and a practicum of the sort of collaborative team-work now dominant in information-driven, "knowledge work" corporations. (In particular, the project will often ask students to team-author Web projects). Each course module with its resulting student contributions will be put on the Web.

In addition, the project will aggressively pursue dissemination of its underlying rationale, curricular resources, and pedagogical and other innovations through the creation of a large-scale, integrated Web site devoted to the topic of "Literature and the Culture of Information." This site will consist of a full suite of Web pages devoted to both branches of the project: contemporary information culture and historical information culture. Each page will address a particular topic (e.g., postindustrialism, minority cultures and information culture, technologies of literature, literacy and media literacy, history of authorship, copyright, and intellectual property) by providing an overview of issues, online resources, and relevant course syllabi. One web page will be dedicated to documenting the instructional innovations of the project in the company of other such innovations around the nation.

The project finishes by augmenting its development group with computing theorists/practitioners from other humanities departments at UCSB to engage in a series of planning workshops for a fully interdisciplinary program in "The Culture of Information." Follow-up will be in the form of this interdisciplinary initiative as well as of the project's many Web pages.

Evaluation is integrated with development. Five extramural scholars have agreed to visit the project in its second and third years for the combined purpose of giving a lecture (or sitting in on a planning workshop) and conducting a review. Ranging from influential literary scholars with a special interest in digital culture to well-known theorists/practioners of information technology based in other disciplines, these visitors are: J. Hillis Miller, Jerome McGann, Martin Irvine, Kathleen Biddick, and Allucquere Rosanne Stone.

2. Narrative

A. Rationale

Since roughly 1980, one of the most widespread movements in U.S. university and college humanities departments has been "cultural studies" (especially, but not exclusively, the "cultural criticism" of English and American literature departments). Generally perceived to include some or all aspects of the New Historicism, New Cultural History, cultural anthropology, popular culture studies, media studies, multiculturalism, gender studies, postmodernism, postcolonialism, subculture studies, late Marxism, and other variants, cultural studies may be understood in one way as a shared response of humanities scholars to the information age.

More exactly, it is a response to the specifically postmodern or postindustrial turn of the information age. Since the advent of the personal computer (also c. 1980), the challenge to humanistic knowledge is no longer just consumer-oriented "mass entertainment" (the long-standing complaint of twentieth-century educators) but a new, production-oriented paradigm of "knowledge work." Driven by digital information technology and backed by the full weight of corporate, media, government, military, and other sectors, this paradigm has increasingly encroached upon the humanities as both a practical and ideal "life of the mind." Practically, it does so for reasons of "productivity" that the humanities have long had time to react to (e.g., by differentiating scholarship as an activity of "reflection" beyond the normal "work"/"leisure" scheme of industrial productivity).⁽¹⁾ But what is new is that knowledge work also competes as an ideal because it is specifically a mode of knowledge itself outside "work"/"leisure." It is "lifelong learning." In the standard idiom of contemporary business theory: "workplace 2000" belongs to "learning organizations" in which "teams" of continually-learning "pay-for-knowledge" workers use networked information technology to achieve the threefold perfection of "smart work": "just in time" (JIT), "flexibility," and "continuous quality improvement" (CQI).⁽²⁾

In the face of such "knowledge," cultural studies is the humanistic response whose basic argument is that situating the humanities in "context"--sociological, political, economic, and otherwise--is now the only way to save a place for humanistic knowledge. Put simply, "context" is what the humanities now have left to contribute to "information." Or rather--updating the humanistic ideal--context need not be just more information. It offers a different kind of information allowing society to judge its present knowledge--in all its promise and limitations--at the bar of historical knowledges. Something is to be learned, in short, from weighing "workplace 2000" against culture 1400-1900.

Yet after a decade and a half of applying advanced approaches to culture, perhaps, nothing more is truly to be learned unless scholars now take seriously the fact that information culture is not just a passive object of analysis (material for yet one more course analyzing popular culture, for example) but a contender as a way of knowing. Nothing further is to be gained, that is, unless the experiment is tried of integrating the concepts and practices of "knowledge work" into cultural studies itself.

The "TRANSCRIPTIONS: Literature and the Culture of Information Project" at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) is a three-year, phased curricular development and demonstration project designed to try this experiment. It brings the considerable cultural-studies strength of the campus (especially in its English department) to bear on the task of exploiting information technology as the necessary conceptual and practical bridge between teaching the humanities and teaching the culture of information. Rather than simply "applying" humanistic approaches to information culture, it proceeds on the assumption that a genuinely two-way reciprocation is called for--one that reconfigures the humanities themselves in informational and technological terms. Thus where scholars have recently grown accustomed to disputing the literary canon, for example, they must now be willing to rephrase the entire controversy in terms of the compelling strangeness posed for our era of "just-in-time" "team work" by the whole history of print technologies, print culture, publisher culture, and literacy that created such a thing as a canon of "timeless" "original works."⁽³⁾

Only through such reciprocal "transcription" between one mode of knowledge and another, the project demonstrates, can the humanistic knowledges be brought into critical conjunction with the dominant informational knowledges--not because they are the same, but because nothing is to be gained unless they are transcribed and taught on the ground of the same.

B. Content and Design of the Project

While culminating in a series of cross-departmental planning workshops for a possible interdisciplinary program, the TRANSCRIPTIONS Project centers initially in the UCSB English Dept. Such concentration allows it to gain intellectual focus, to take advantage of a particularly strong group of cultural critics with experience developing instructional information technology, to build upon existing courses and Internet resources, and to exploit substantial campus cost-sharing funds committed specifically to an English department Internet authoring studio. The project is thus a pilot program that aims to adapt the curriculum of one important humanities discipline to the information age at a level of execution high enough to demonstrate (through aggressive dissemination on the World Wide Web) that the project's underlying rationale is viable for other higher-education humanities disciplines and institutions.

The project's development group is directed by Alan Liu, whose combined theoretical and practical work in cultural studies as well as humanities online computing contributes a unifying rationale (and stockpile of material resources) at an advanced stage of evolution. (Liu's most directly relevant work include: his book-in-progress on The Future Literary: Literary History and Information Culture; his Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research; and his courses involving the Internet.)⁽⁴⁾ Five other English dept. faculty have been chosen both for their expertise in developing/implementing instructional information technology and for their complementary approaches and historical emphases: Charles Bazerman (history of technology, history of print culture, sociology of literacy, cultural theory, history and theory of rhetoric), Carl Gutiérrez-Jones (postmodernism, postcolonialism, minority cultures, literature and law), Christopher Newfield (culture of postindustrial corporations, cultural theory, nineteenth-century American studies), Carol Braun Pasternack (medieval studies, history of orality and literacy, manuscript culture, gender studies), and Mark Rose (history of copyright and authorship, theory and law of intellectual property, Renaissance and eighteenth-century studies). [Update: Carl Gutiérrez-Jones has since left the project while William Warner, who specializes in eighteenth-century liaterature and the history of media, has signed on.] At once diverse in period coverage and tightly compatible in interests, this group represents a new departmental configuration that would not have been possible before the emergence of information technology as both theme and tool. [See section D of this narrative for more information on participants.]

Teamed with the faculty will be two 50%-time graduate-student research assistants during each of the projects three academic years (three 25%-time assistants in the summers),⁽⁵⁾ three 50%-time graduate-student teaching assistants in each of years 2 and 3 to help implement larger undergraduate courses (one assistant each academic quarter), one 50%-time graduate-student teaching assistant in one quarter of year 1 to help train more students in Web authoring, two undergraduate research assistants in all academic years, one staff-level computer system administrator throughout (25% time), and one 25%-time graduate-student technical research assistant in the academic years. Graduate-student assistants are to be recruited from a departmental population already well advanced in information literacy and World Wide Web authoring. Undergraduate assistants will be drawn from the increasing number of technically gifted students who have in recent years attended English courses using the Internet.⁽⁶⁾ Particularly advantageous is the fact that the department has already developed the technical and social protocols necessary to allow faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates to work collaboratively on WWW projects. An experimental authoring collective initiated in early 1995 (the "Many Wolves"⁽⁷⁾) teamed up faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates to originate the "Romantic Chronology" Web project; and several graduate students have worked on such large faculty Web sites as Liu's "Voice of the Shuttle" and Gutiérrez-Jones's "Affirmative Action and Diversity: A Web Site for Research."

The combined faculty/student development group will create content of four kinds: (i) curricular resources (including individual course Web pages), (ii) a common project Web site, (iii) pedagogical and infrastructural innovations, and (iv) plans for an interdisciplinary program.

B. (i) Curricular Resources:

The first type of content consists of curricular resources (courses and course-materials) focused on the intersection between literary history and the culture of information. "Intersection" does not mean simply courses on literature that make expedient use of new information technology, nor, vice versa, courses on contemporary information culture that make illustrative use of literary content. Rather, the project intends to create a curricular structure capable of exploring how "literature" is conceptually related to "information"--in short, how the forms, media, and cultures once empowering the "well-read" stand in critical conjunction to the forms, media, and cultures now empowering the "well-informed."

As per the rationale of reciprocal transcription between the humanities and information culture stated above [section A of this narrative], such a conjunction will be pursued through two linked tracks of curricular development. On the one hand, the project will extend existing courses and develop new ones in the areas of postmodernism, postindustrialism (especially the philosophies of the new "downsized" corporations), globalism, mass culture, media history, intellectual property, theory of technology, and online culture--i.e., the related contexts that now make information such a powerful paradigm. On the other hand, it will extend and develop courses in the history and theory of orality, literacy, manuscript culture, early print culture, the book, the archive and library, the technology of the canon (e.g., publishing history), literature as an academic discipline, copyright, etc.--i.e., the related contexts that have always made literature itself an "information technology" (or what a recent movement in literary interpretation calls "materialities of communication").⁽⁸⁾ The linkage between the literary and informational axes of the project will be cinched by a core course on "Literature and the Culture of Information" as well as by substantive cross-linkages in other courses (e.g., seminars comparing medieval manuscripts and hypertext) and common conceptual/practical use of the World Wide Web. Such a mating of the historical "technology" of literature and the culture of information will create a tight, compelling focus unlike the broader or different focus of other programs now starting up around the nation on "computing and humanities," "computing and English," "digital publishing," and so on (but see below for plans to solicit collaboration with such programs).

The target for this part of the project is approximately 22 separate curricular modules (syllabi and course materials). [Update: plans have been scaled back due to funding levels.] The module for the core course will certainly be developed in the first year; the exact timing of the other modules is subject to the availability of individual faculty and particular graduate students in a given academic year during the project. Each module will be put online on the Web.

Depending on enrollment figures and other factors, these modules will be implemented in graduate and undergraduate versions in a total of approximately 24 undergraduate lectures or seminars and 10 graduate seminars over three years (some team-taught). [Update: plans have been scaled back due to funding levels.] The first of these courses will be taught in the second year of the project (after the first year of the three-year development cycle); and the last in the fourth year (after the last year of the three-year development cycle). Implementation is offset from development by one year because of the extensive WWW and other work needed to put course materials online, to design and make computing arrangements for Web-based student authoring assignments, and to create the common project WWW framework. A prototype for the kind of courses the project will create is Alan Liu's "Canon Revision: History, Theory, Practice" (first given Fall 1996), in which discussion of the intellectual implications of the Web is backed up by a major Web-authoring team assignment (though Transcriptions also expects to develop variant assignment models). Emphasis is given to both undergraduate and graduate levels of instruction because of the need to create a vertically-integrated pedagogical structure in which each level of interaction--faculty/graduate, graduate/undergraduate, faculty/undergraduate--reinforces the collaborative team-work necessary to the whole enterprise (see below for more on the team-concept). Graduate students training under faculty to develop Web projects, for example, will serve as assistants in undergraduate courses, which in turn will cultivate undergraduates willing to become research assistants in the overall project.

Courses created by the project will become part of the permanent repertoire of the department (and will also contribute to a possible future UCSB interdisciplinary program). Specifically, graduate courses will be the basis of a new topical "field" in the department's combined M.A./Ph.D. graduate program (students in the program elect three fields of concentration from a choice of eleven). While the undergraduate curriculum at UCSB does not allow for equivalent field structure, the project's undergraduate courses will be timed and spaced where possible to allow students to build a de facto field of emphasis. The sharing of common computing resources in the English department as well as of the broader Web resources specified below will also foster a greater than usual level of undergraduate integration.

B. (ii) WWW Site:

Because the project is designed to match curricular development with extramural dissemination, it will not only put the materials for individual courses online but also integrate such materials (together with links to those developed by other institutions) in a large-scale, integral Web site devoted to the topic of "Literature and the Culture of Information." Where possible, the site will be jump-started by borrowing resources, tools, contact-networks, and other experience previously developed for such large Web projects in the English dept. as Liu's "Voice of the Shuttle" and "Romantic Chronology" and Gutierrez-Jones's "Affirmative Action and Diversity: A Web Site for Research" (together with such graduate-student Web projects as Rita Raley's "History of English Page," Patrick Sharp's "Science, Technology, and Culture Studies at UCSB Page," Carl Stahmer's "Pre-History of Cognitive Science Page," and the collectively authored "TORGO: A WebTool for On-Line Journal Research"). It will consist of a full suite of Web pages according to the following structure (subject to revision). Each page will consist of a narrative overview of issues, a set of links to online resources (drawing in part from the stockpiles in the above-mentioned resources), and links to associated course syllabi (which will then also be duplicated and gathered on a "demonstration courses" sub-page):

• (Home Page:)
  TRANSCRIPTIONS: LITERATURE & THE CULTURE OF INFORMATION PROJECT
  
• (Sub-Pages:)
  1. DESCRIPTION & RATIONALE
  2. TEACHING THE CULTURE OF INFORMATION:
     1. Postmodernism
     2. Postindustrialism
     3. Globalism (World Communications, Economies, Cultures)
     4. Technologism (Theory and Sociology of Technology)
     5. Mass Culture
     6. Minority Cultures & Information Culture
     7. Intellectual Property and Information Law
  3. TEACHING THE RELATION OF LITERARY HISTORY TO THE CULTURE OF INFORMATION:
     1. The Ages of the Word (I): Orality and Literacy
     2. The Ages of the Word (II): Literacy and Media Literacy
     3. The Economics of Literature
     4. National Literatures and Global Literatures
     5. Technologies of Literature (From Scroll to Screen)
     6. Mass Literatures and Minority Literatures
     7. History of Authorship and Copyright
  4. PARADIGMS: EXHIBITS IN THE HISTORY OF INFORMATION CULTURE:
     1. History of the "Page"
     2. "What is an Author"?
     3. What is "Reading"?
     4. The Idea of the "Archive"
     5. The Canon and the Web
  5. PROGRAMS IN LITERATURE AND THE CULTURE OF INFORMATION: (links to relevant departments or programs around the nation and world.) (Note: Because the department has built up a very extensive national and world network of contributors to its existing Web pages (see, for example, the link to "contributors" in "Voice of the Shuttle"), the project will be especially advantaged in soliciting contributions of course syllabi and related resources from other institutions. Special attention will be paid to cultivating a relationship with several, differently focused pilot programs elsewhere.)
     
  6. DEMONSTRATION COURSES: (links to relevant online course syllabi)
  7. PEDAGOGICAL METHODS (see explanation)

The Web site would continue to grow after the funded years of the project.

B. (iii) Pedagogical and Infrastructural Innovations:

Since one of the project's tenets is that bringing the humanities into conjunction with information culture requires reconfiguring the humanities both in concept and practice (by adopting/reflecting upon at least some of the successful methods of contemporary "knowledge work"), special emphasis will be given to developing new instructional techniques supported by a new model of humanities computing facilities.

Department-Based Computing Facilities: As in many universities, UCSB has central campus computing facilities for undergraduate and graduate students and individual computers for faculty, but no provision (at least in the humanities) for faculty and students to work on common projects together in facilities easily and informally accessible before, during, and after class. (Furthermore, UCSB currently has no server space for undergraduates Web authoring at all.) To succeed in its curricular development and demonstration goals, therefore, the project will concurrently need to demonstrate the viability of a new vision of the future humanities department--one centered around a small, locally-controlled computing "studio" (rather than cubicle-in-a-line "lab") designed from the ground up for communal work intimately related to courses. Both the project's development group and its students (in courses with a Web-authoring assignment) will make use of a specially designated Internet-authoring studio in the UCSB English department for which the majority of funds ($50,000) and most of the technical support (.25% of time from an experienced system administrator in the English dept.) is being committed by UCSB on a cost-sharing basis. (Because these funds are intended for faculty/graduate-student computing, however, the project is also requesting supplementary funding from NEH for an extra four personal computers that would allow undergraduates to do Web authoring, plus assorted other, lesser costs.) In fully-funded form, the studio would include a department Web server dedicated to experimental, collaborative online development (freed from the stricter access and software restrictions necessary to a campus-wide server); four high-end multimedia personal computers for faculty/graduate-student authoring (PCS and Macs); four equivalent personal computers accessible to undergraduates (linked to the common server); two instructional modules with multimedia projectors for classroom use; one multimedia laptop and LCD projection panel for demonstrating the project at conferences and other institutions; and assorted support equipment and software. At the present time, the project expects to commit to a Unix server running a Sun or Solaris operating system (depending on the advice at time of purchase by the system administrator), but it may also elect to commit to Windows NT. Details regarding the choice of HTTPD (Web) server software and appropriate application software (especially a choice of popular HTML editors and image editors) are also to be finalized closer to the occasion. [Update: the project has since committed to a Windows NT server running the Microsoft Backoffice Small Business Server, which is being upgraded as project needs grow.]

Instructional Techniques: Using the above-described infrastructure, the project will design its courses and WWW resources to demonstrate that teaching the relation between the humanities and the culture of information requires both thinking about and enacting some portion of the major "learning" initiatives instituted by corporate and other "learning organizations." For the purposes of the project, these initiatives can be simplified under the two headings of the reorganization of knowledge work and the redefinition of knowledge products.

In regard to the former, the elementary organizational unit of contemporary knowledge work is the self-managed, multi-competent "team." The TRANSCRIPTIONS Project, therefore, will invest heavily in designing courses around team Web projects in which groups of students (facilitated by the instructor) decide for themselves how to share the research, writing, and technical work needed to put up a Web page on an assigned topic (even trading or outsourcing work with other teams as necessary). The prototype for such team Web assignments lies in Alan Liu's existing course on "Canon Revision: History, Theory, Practice" (though the project will develop variant models of pedagogy as well). If possible, team-taught courses will also be given.

In regard to the redefinition of knowledge products: the emphasis on Web assignments underscores the project's goal of supplementing the model of "finished" essays or exams restricted to an audience of one (the instructor) with a model in which "continuous quality improvement" (in Web idiom: "under construction") and engagement with a global audience is the norm. As project faculty have already learned from past courses utilizing the Web, student commitment intensifies when it is perceived that the pedagogical situation has shifted from one in which the instructor and student face only each other (for intense to-and-fro conversation) to one in which they also turn outwards together to a broader audience.

Dissemination of the above-described pedagogical and infrastructural innovations will be by way of a special Web page in the project Web site (see outline above). This page will describe in detail the pedagogy and physical plant of the project; and it will also describe other innovative pedagogies and infrastructures elsewhere that are relevant to the goal of bringing the humanities and information culture into reciprocal relation. (Project participants will exploit the national and world network of contacts built up through previous Web projects to solicit online curricular and other material. The "Contributors" list of Liu's "Voice of the Shuttle," for example, is effectively a mailing list of potential contributors.

B. (iv) Plans for an Interdisciplinary Program:

Because the nature of information culture means that literature can no longer be conceived separately from other branches of the common digital stream--and other humanities disciplines--the project in its concluding year (preceded by preliminary work in years 1 and 2) will convene a series of planning meetings dedicated to setting up a fully interdisciplinary "Culture of Information" program at UCSB. For this purpose, participants in the English Dept. development group will build upon their already established working relationships with computing theorists/practitioners in Art Studio, Art History, German, History, and other departments. In particular, they would tap an initial supplement to the development group consisting of three of the most proactive humanities computing scholars/practitioners on campus: Victoria Vesna (Art Studio), Ann Jensen Adams (History of Art and Architecture), and Wolf Kittler (German). This interdisciplinary team has agreed to join the English Dept. development group for several meetings in years 1 and 2 of the project designed to explore the intellectual, instructional, and administrative parameters of an interdisciplinary program centered on several core courses and a cluster of satellite courses drawn from different departments (with supporting Web resources). Then in year 3 the total collective would work intensively to develop implementation plans for the program to be presented to the UCSB administration for approval. (If approved, program implementation would not occur until the year following the termination of NEH funding; it thus falls under the category of "follow-up.") [Update: this portion of the project's plans are subject to radical change depending on other developments in the campus organization of programs relating to information technology.]

C. Institutional Context

The University of California, Santa Barbara, was one of the original four nodes of the Internet when it was initiated in 1969 (as the ARPAnet). It has a high level of computing literacy extending to the humanities, and has recently completed a major upgrade and expansion of campus networking infrastructure allowing for increased bandwidth, connectivity (including Ethernet ports in student dorm rooms), and a new combined Humanities and Social Sciences Computing facility. In addition to the individual interests and experience of project participants (described in Section E of this narrative), four main factors contribute to converting this technical underpinning into strong institutional support for the TRANSCRIPTIONS Project (starting with factors local to the English department and moving outwards):

There is a strong English Department emphasis on cultural studies. The department includes nationally-respected faculty (several on the project staff) who have made leading contributions to the theory and practice of methods ranging from the New Historicism to neo-pragmatism to multiculturalism.

There is a strong track record in projects that join cultural studies to information technology. Of particular note is the "Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research," the root page of the campus's humanities server. This complex of some 70 individual pages devoted to the humanities currently [in 1996] draws visitors from approximately 1,000 different remote machines per day during the academic year (individual users per machine is unknown). Particularly strong in VoS are the sub-pages devoted to "Cultural Studies," "Cyberculture," "Literature," "Literary Theory," and "Science, Technology, and Culture." Also of note in this respect is "Affirmative Action and Diversity: A Web Site for Research."

There is a very active Science, Technology, and Culture discussion group on campus headquartered in the English Dept. (led by project-member Charles Bazerman and assisted by English Dept. graduate student Patrick Sharp). The group meets regularly with well-known extramural scholars to discuss topics in the relation between science/technology and culture. It will be an invaluable ally in the TRANSCRIPTIONS project.

There is very deep, campus-wide support for interdisciplinary studies. The UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center not only funds many projects and conferences each year but has recently granted research assistance for the "Voice of the Shuttle" Web site. (In addition, project-member Mark Rose is the former director of the system-wide University of California Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine.) Project-members also work regularly with colleagues and students in such far-flung departments or programs as Art Studio, History of Art and Architecture, Chicano Studies, German/Slavic/Semitic Studies, Sociology, Women's Studies, and others. For example, collaboration with the Art Studio computing lab has proved especially fruitful.

D. Evaluation

Evaluation will occur by means of on-site visits by five extramural scholars who have agreed to come to UCSB for the dual purpose of giving a lecture (and/or sitting in on a planning workshop) and writing a letter of review for the NEH. During the visits, referees will have a chance to see facilities and course materials, consult with the development group (including student assistants), read the original and revised plans, talk to others in the department and campus at large, and (where possible) look at the work students are currently doing in project classes as well as student evaluations of classes. The project will also keep (and make available for inspection) logs of Web server access as well as an archive of correspondence about the project from other institutions.

Referees will be asked to evaluate the viability of the project's overall vision for humanities computing (and literary computing in particular). The criteria to be used in judging such viability are as follows:

• The soundness and clarity of the project's underlying rationale (the notion of "reciprocal" engagement between contemporary and historical information technologies stated in Sections A and B of this Narrative)
• The quality and quantity of curricular resources developed
• The success of the project's pedagogical and infrastructural innovations (described in Section B.iii of this Narrative)
• The quality of the project's integrated Web site (described in Section B.ii of this narrative), specifically whether the site combines these elements: clarity of overview, breadth of coverage, depth of knowledge and resources in defined topics. The technical and graphical effectiveness of the site will also be a factor.
• The impact of the project as measured by any available anecdotal and statistical evidence of utilization (e.g., correspondence, Web server statistics).
• The direction and promise of plans for a future interdisciplinary program (described in section B.iv of this Narrative)

The five lecturer/referees have been chosen to highlight different aspects of the project. Pending final arrangements, which are difficult to confirm this far ahead, two will visit in year 2 of the project to offer formative review; and 3 will visit in year 3 for formative and summative review):

• Kathleen Biddick. Biddick is a historian of the medieval period at U. of Notre Dame who also writes on the history and theory of technology and cybernetics. She is currently finishing a book titled Medieval Writing Lessons: Technology/Ethnography/Mourning. Her visit to the UCSB project will be informed by her expertise in both older and new technologies of information. In addition, her background in history suits her to emphasizing the interdisciplinary vector of the project in its final year.
  
  
• Martin Irvine. Irvine is a medievalist at Georgetown U. who is co-author (with Deborah Everhart of Georgetown U.) of the best-known site for medieval studies on the Web: "Labyrinth." He will bring to the UCSB project the twin perspectives of the contemporary culture of information and historical "information technology" (manuscript culture, the history of literacy, etc.). Because he is also director of the innovative Georgetown Communication, Culture, and Technology Program, he is also especially well suited to judging the programmatic effectiveness of the compatible, but differently focused, UCSB project.
  
  
• Jerome McGann. McGann, who teaches at U. Virginia, Charlottesville, is one of most influential cultural and literary critics of the past two decades, and has polymath achievements in theory, criticism, and scholarship. Highly relevant to the UCSB project is his dual competence in the revisionary theory/practice of textual editing and online hypermedia development (he is the author of the technically-sophisticated and rigorously edited "The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Research Archive" on the Web and a major participant in the U. of Virginia Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities).
  
  
• J. Hillis Miller. One of the most widely-known and influential of literary scholars, Miller has been a leader in positioning the humanities relative to general culture (e.g., through his past Presidency of the Modern Language Assoc.) and has recently focused on the relation between literary culture and information culture. His latest book explores this topic under the title Black Holes. He teaches at the University of California, Irvine.
  
  
• Allucquere Rosanne Stone. One of the most celebrated critics of cyberculture in the academy as well as general society, Sandy Stone is a scholar, theorist, and performance artist in the Radio-TV-Film dept. of U. Texas at Austin. Her latest book from MIT Press is The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. She will be the final evaluator of the project in the year when it moves toward generalizing its innovations in the form of an interdisciplinary program.

E. Project Staff and Participants

DEVELOPMENT GROUP FACULTY (UCSB ENGLISH DEPT.): The development group includes specialists in both English and American literature across most major periods (medieval to postmodern) as well as many variant approaches to cultural studies. It also represents a strong fund of experience in developing Web resources.

1. Alan Liu, Prof. (project director). Liu is one of the leading practitioners and theoreticians of cultural studies as well as of nineteenth-century studies (his works include his book on Wordsworth: The Sense of History and such essays as "The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism" and "Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail"). His current work directly relevant to the project include his book-in-progress, The Future Literary: Literary History and Information Culture, his "Voice of the Shuttle," "Palinurus: The Academy and the Corporation," and other Web pages; and his courses on "Theory of Postmodernism" and "Canon Revision: History, Theory, and Practice" (both involving a major Internet component). The Future Literary includes major sections on models of "knowledge" in the current academy and current corporations, literary history as practiced and theorized in instructional anthologies and other such works since 1985, and theory and sociology of information technology. Liu has been a member of three campus committees overseeing computing strategy at UCSB and written a 124-page Ultrabasic Guide to the Internet for Humanities Users at UCSB (used in undergraduate humanities courses involving the Internet). As past director of the UCSB English Dept. graduate program and the Yale British Studies Program, he has administrative experience at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

2. Charles Bazerman, Prof. Previously a professor of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology, Bazerman is a major contributor to the fields of science, technology, and culture (including the history, sociology, and theory of science/technology) as well as history and theory of rhetoric. His current book in press is The Languages of Edison; and he leads the very active interdisciplinary Science, Technology, and Culture discussion group at UCSB. He is currently researching and teaching in the additional fields of the history and sociology of literacy (including the areas of pre-electronic technologies of literacy; and the legal, journalistic, commercial, educational and socio-cultural systems of literacy). Courses he has taught that are directly relevant to the project include "History of Literate Culture" and "Cultural Representations: Science and Technology" (these and many of his other courses have syllabi on the Web).

3. [Update: Prof. Gutiérrez-Jones has since left the Transcriptions project.] Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, Assoc. Prof. Gutiérrez-Jones works at the intersection of a unique blend of research and instructional interests: American studies, Chicano and minority studies, cultural studies (including postmodern and postcolonial theory), and literature and the law. His book titled Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse appeared in 1995; and he is currently at work on a book on Judgment in Crisis: Legal Culture and Race in America. These interests have also produced a major Web resource that is directly relevant to the project: his "Affirmative Action and Diversity: A Web Site for Research," which is stocked with diverse opinions regarding Affirmative Action topics and includes policy documents and an annotated bibliography of research and teaching materials. Besides contributing to other areas of the project, he will also especially aid in exploring a topic with vast research and instructional potential: the relation between minority cultures and information cultures. He is currently Acting Director of the UCSB Center for Chicano Studies.

4. Christopher Newfield, Assoc. Prof. Newfield is an Americanist working in the fields of nineteenth-century literature (his book on The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America appeared in 1996) and contemporary cultural criticism. Currently he is working on postindustrial corporate culture for a book project that includes interviews with major business management theorists and consultants (an essay from the project titled "Corporate Culture Wars" is forthcoming; another essay on "Corporate Pleasures for a Corporate Planet" appeared in 1995). Along with Alan Liu, whose book on The Future Literary also includes a section on the philosophy of the new corporations, he will add to the project a unique, sharp focus on the relation between the paradigms of humanities knowledge and "knowledge work." Newfield has also co-edited two volumes of essays on other aspects of cultural studies: Mapping Multiculturalism and After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s.

5. Carol Braun Pasternack, Assoc. Prof. Pasternack will be the anchor of the project in the medieval period, whose pre-modern paradigms of orality and textuality are especially important to measure against the very different, and yet also in many ways uncannily similar, paradigms of contemporary digital media. She is a specialist in bringing contemporary theoretical approaches to bear on the issue of historical textuality. Her book, The Textuality of Old English Poetry, appeared in 1995; and she is co-editor with A. N. Doane of Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages. She is currently expanding her sphere of interests in a book-in-progress on Questions of Gender in Anglo-Saxon England. She is a strong proponent of collaborative instructional experiments; and has made the Web an important part of her recent courses (e.g., designing research assignments for students that require significant work on the Web).

6. Mark Rose, Prof. Rose will help the project span the older historical periods spanning from the Renaissance (he has published widely on Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, and other writers) to the eighteenth century (where he has become a world authority in the field of history of authorship, copyright, and intellectual property law). His book Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (1993) has had wide impact; and his ongoing work along this line will directly contribute to the project courses he will design on authorship and the legal history/theory of copyright and intellectual property (extending to the context of electronic media). Rose is also continuing to work in the Renaissance field in ways that intersect with information culture. Presently he is completing a CD-ROM based electronic publication for W.W. Norton titled The Norton Shakespeare Workshop, which follows a "processual" approach to Shakespeare encouraging the student to explore the plays as dramatic retellings that underwent change and revision during Shakespeare's lifetime and that have undergone continual change and revision since. A special feature will be a virtual reality exercise that will allow the user to explore various stagings of representative moments from the plays. Rose is the former director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine; he has also chaired the UCSB English dept.

7. [Update: Prof. Warner has joined the Transcriptions project.] William Warner.

FACULTY FROM OTHER UCSB HUMANITIES PARTICIPATING IN PLANNING FOR A POSSIBLE FUTURE INTERDISCIPLINARY PROGRAM IN "THE CULTURE OF INFORMATION":

1. Ann Jensen Adams, Assoc. Prof., History of Art and Architecture. A specialist in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art (her most recent book is Public Faces, Private Identities: Portraiture and the Production of Identity in Seventeenth-Century Holland, in press), Adams has become one of the leading proponents of humanities computing both on and off campus. At UCSB, she has received in recent past years a UCSB grant and (with Ulrich Keller in the Art History dept.) a GTE Grant for her department's Image Digitization project. Outside campus, she sits on the College Art Association's Committee on Electronic Information.

2. Wolf Kittler, Prof., German. Chair of the UCSB Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Studies Dept., Kittler is a major theorist of technology with a special interest in historical information technology. His work in this innovative field will greatly augment the project when it begins to plan for interdisciplinary collaboration. His publications include: "Langage de machine," "Enigma: Pascalprogram: Diskette" (with Gisela Kommerell), "Das Posthorn: Signal und Symbol," "Schreibmaschinen, Sprechmaschinen: Effekte technischer Medien im Werk Franz Kafkas," "Digitale und analoge Speicher: Zum Begriff der memoria in der Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts."

3. Victoria Vesna, Assoc. Prof., Art Studio. [Update: Prof. Vesna has moved to UCLA] Vesna is an installation and performance artist specializing in new computer technologies, including not only the Web but sophisticated interactive projects involving combinations of the Web, multimedia, VRML, and databases. Two of her most ambitious recent projects are "Virtual Concrete" and "Bodies INCorporated," both of which approach the human figure in ways highly complementary to cultural studies (e.g., the positioning of bodies within a virtual environment composed in part of legal and corporate discourse). Vesna created and runs the state-of-the-art computing studio in the Art Studio Dept., which serves as a model for the sort of collaborative computing space the "Literature and the Culture of Information" project will build. She has exhibited internationally at a number of shows including the Venice Biennale (86), the P.S.1 Museum, NY (89), the Long Beach Museum (93; where she served as media council chair and Member of Board of Directors), and The Huntington Beach Art Center (95).

TECHNICAL STAFF:

1. Terri Jo Ortega. The long-time Academic Computing Analyst for the English Dept., Ortega will be head technical support for the project and system administrator of its server. She has recently been the system administrator for both the department LAN-server (running Novell) and the campus-wide humanities server (previously a DEC machine running Ultrix, now a Sun Sparcstation running SUN OS 4.1.3_U1). She sits on the following campus-wide computing committees: Letters & Science Computing Advisory Committee, Human Resource Management Initiative Implementation Committee, Chancellor's Staff Advisory Committee (Co-Chair), and the Technology subcommittee of the Chancellor's Staff Advisory Committee.

VISITING EXTRAMURAL LECTURERS/REVIEWERS:

(See Section D of this narrative)

F. Follow-Up and Dissemination

Follow-up and dissemination will occur in two main forms:

(i) World Wide Web:

As described fully above (see section B.ii of this narrative), materials for individual courses developed in the project will be put on the Web together with an overall, integrated project Web site serving to introduce students and instructors elsewhere to the project's rationale, methods, and main topical branches. The Web is the ideal channel of dissemination because so much of the practical and conceptual work in the project's courses revolve around this medium. Publicity for the project's Web site will be generated through placement of notices on the major general search engines, directories, and discussion lists on the Web (e.g., Yahoo!, Net-Happenings, etc.) and on the more specialized literary and theoretical discussion lists in which project-members participate (customized, for example, such that the list for the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism receives special detail on courses in the project relevant to Romanticism). Just as importantly, the project will exploit the national and world network of contacts it has built up through previous Web projects (see, for example, the link to "contributors" in "Voice of the Shuttle"). These networks constitute a ready-made channel of publicity and dissemination, and will also be important in soliciting contributions from other institutions.

The project is intended to be disseminated primarily to instructors and students in higher education. But experience from past Web projects shows that a significant number of K-12 educators and students will likely use its resources as well. While the project will not have the resources in funding or expertise to tailor its materials into a parallel, secondary set dedicated to K-12 (though, hopefully, the topical overviews on its Web site will partly serve this purpose), it will follow the precedent of "The Voice of the Shuttle" in being highly responsive to queries and suggestions from this sector.

Like previous Web sites in the department, the Web resources for the project will continue as a dynamic, growing resource after the termination of the NEH grant.

(ii) Plans for Interdisciplinary Program.

The project is designed to follow through by expanding its basic concept into a cross-departmental, interdisciplinary program at UCSB on "The Culture of Information" (see section B.iv of this narrative for description).

In addition, it is expected that faculty and graduate students involved with the project will have a chance to present it by invitation at national conferences and other institutions.

Notes

1. The model of scholarship as "reflection," however, has altered significantly toward that of "productive research" in the last few decades. This is the subject of Jean-François Lyotard's discussion of "performative knowledge" in his The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), and of Bill Readings' discussion of "excellent knowledge" in his The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard Univ. Press, 1996)
2. The following are among the many works on the new corporatism and the "team concept" that have been consulted in research preparatory to this project proposal. [Update: for a more comprehensive research bibliography, see see Alan Liu's Web site titled, Palinurus: The Academy and the Corporation--Teaching the Humanities in a Restructured World.]
   • Boyett, Joseph H., and Henry P. Conn, Workplace 2000: The Revolution Reshaping American Business (New York: Plume / Penguin, 1992)
   • Davidow, William H., and Michael S. Malone, The Virtual Corporation: Structuring and Revitalizing the Corporation for the 21st Century (New York: HarperBusiness, 1992)
   • Hammer, Michael, and James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution (New York: HarperBusiness, 1993)
   • Tapscott, Don, The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996)
   • Tomasko, Robert M., Downsizing: Reshaping the Corporation for the Future, rev. ed. (New York: American Management Assoc., 1990)
   • Katzenbach, Jon R., and Douglas K. Smith, The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization (New York: HarperBusiness, 1994) [first pub. 1993]
   • Mohrman, Susan Albers, Susan G. Cohen, and Allan M. Mohrman, Jr., Designing Team-Based Organizations: New Forms for Knowledge Work (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1995)
   • Gardenswartz, Lee, and Anita Rowe, Diverse Teams at Work: Capitalizing on the Power of Diversity (Burr Ridge, Illinois: Irwin, 1994)
   • Parker, Mike, and Jane Slaughter, Choosing Sides: Unions and the Team Concept (Detroit: Labor Notes / South End Press, 1988)
3. See section B of this narrative for fuller and more precise description of an "information technology" approach to the humanities.
4. Internet addresses for all Web pages mentioned in this narrative are gathered for convenient reference in Appendix 6. Print-outs of sample faculty Web pages are in Appendix 4. Print-outs of sample graduate-student Web pages are in Appendix 5. [Note: appendices are not included in this online version of the Transcriptions 1996 NEH proposal.]
5. 50%-time assistance by a graduate student is defined as 20 hours per week. The norm during the academic year, therefore, will be 40 hours of research assistance (plus the hours of teaching and other assistance listed below). The project faculty consider this to be adequate assistance to develop the online and other curricular resources described in this narrative.
6. Undergraduates in Liu's "Theory of Postmodernism" course, for example, subsequently collaborated with him on various Web projects organized by a combined faculty, graduate-student, undergraduate UCSB authoring collective called the "Many Wolves" (mentioned below). [Update: this collective is no longer active; many of its members have moved on to other individual and collaborative Web projects. "Many Wolves" served essentially as an early seed bed for such projects at UCSB.]
7. See the home page of the collective for more information.
8. See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, ed., Materialities of Communication, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994). This volume represents a broad, primarily European movement to read literature from the point of view of the technologies and media constituting it. Also representative, for example, is Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's "Didascalion" (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), and Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990).
             To take just a single compelling instance of the literary/informatic cross-resonances that will thus emerge: no student directed simultaneously to the World Wide Web and to Elizabeth Eisenstein's classic The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979) or Roger Chartier's The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987) will be able to miss the uncanny congruence between the unsettled status of the "page" then and now--i.e., the simultaneously technological, social, political, economic, and other transitions implied in the enormous differences between orality/literacy, manuscript/print culture, text/graphics, author-/publisher-control, and so on as manifested in the sixteenth-century image volante, placard, or canard and current Web pages (see esp. Chartier, pp. 158-70).

This page created by Alan Liu for the Transcriptions Team, 1/20/99 (revised 8/18/00)