Alan Liu

This research is divided into two closely related projects: Media, History and Digital, Humanities, where the comma in each title indicates a disjunction in thought about digital new media in the humanities that needs to be explored. The first study is a philosophically-toned reflection on how media history affects our understanding of history, and vice versa. It shows that the sense of history alters, but does not vanish, in today's age of instant information. The second study is a wide-angled view of the development of the digital humanities field. It reflects on the way the field contributes to changes in the humanities generally and to changes in the relation of the humanities to a new "public knowledge."