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Alan Liu

Alan Liu

@alanyliu.bsky.social

2.8K followers 300 following 310 posts

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/ .. more

Art 25%

Communication & Media Studies 17%

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Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 4d

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... )

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."

Reposted by Alan Liu

Scott Kleinman @skleinman.bsky.social · 4d

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. +

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 21d

Thanks, Neil. Greetings after all these years!

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 21d

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.

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 21d

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

Agentic AI Browser for Deep Search & Automation | Fellou

The world's first agentic AI browser that automates web and desktop-based tasks. Providing deep search, cross-app workflow automation, images, coding and even music-all with military-grade security.

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 21d

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.)

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 21d

Structuring a complex agentic research task in stages has two advantages. It sequences logical operations based on dependencies (e.g., what an agentic AI needs to do first to ensure reliability of next tasks); and it sets what are essentially debuggin breakpoints so I know about where a job fails.

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 21d

Asking another LLM to optimize prompts produced (quoting ChatGPT) "tightened, agent-ready" prompts asking Fellou to "work in staged passes, enforce data quality, & deliver reusable assets" with "success criteria, schemas, checklists ... so it is far likelier to finish with high-quality outputs."

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 21d

I've had success making complex Fellou.ai jobs run more reliably by uploading draft prompts to ChatGPT & asking for revisions optimized for operationalization ("optimize prompt to structure & stage Fellou's research & generation of deliverables with greatest chance of success & with best results").

Agentic AI Browser for Deep Search & Automation | Fellou

The world's first agentic AI browser that automates web and desktop-based tasks. Providing deep search, cross-app workflow automation, images, coding and even music-all with military-grade security.

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 21d

I agree with this from your blog post: "In the end, I might have benefited more from watching the Browser work and "think" than from the actual output it produced." Just seeing how Fellou.ai structured and staged its research gave me great ideas on how to improve my research strategy.

Reposted by Alan Liu

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 22d

A portrait of influence: my ridiculously over-annotated copy of John Guillory’s _Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation_. I hadn’t looked at my physical copy for years but pulled it off the shelf today to recommend to a grad student a line of thought that John develops.

Top-down view of Alan Liu's hardback copy of John Guillory’s book _Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation_ showing a dense mass of post-it notes marking annotated pages.

Cover of hardback copy of John Guillory’s book _Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation_ showing a dense mass of post-it notes marking annotated pages.

Reposted by Alan Liu

Martin Paul Eve @eve.gd · 26d

Exciting book out early next year! It will be open access 6 months after print publication. I have a chapter in there on shadow libraries as infrastructure.

Edited by @alanyliu.bsky.social, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies

www.upress.umn.edu/978151791608...

Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities

How digital humanities can shape and be shaped by the infrastructures that sustain our worldCritical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities reimagines...

www.upress.umn.edu

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · Oct 10

I'm getting great benefit from what might be called "adversarial generative prompting." For complex research (e.g., see my post on using Fellou.ai agentic AI: bsky.app/profile/alan...), I ask several LLMs to critique & improve my prompt in detailed ways before burning credits in running the prompt.

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · Oct 6

Fellou cited 1 article for which I was lead author but collected many items from it, in the same way it collected 14 items from 1 of Geoffrey Harpham's pieces. My post discusses this at one point (see screenshot). Re: international balance, adjusting the prompt could change that, but I haven't tried

Screenshot of a paragraph from Alan Liu, “Humanities Definitions Research Project: An Experiment with Agentic AI,” 5 October 2025, https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/humanities-definitions-research-project-an-experiment-with-agentic-ai/. The paragraph contains the following text:

"Thirdly, Fellou can concentrate on particular sources to mine multiple materials in bursts. For example, Fellou collected 14 separate paraphrases or quotes from Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s essay “Finding Ourselves: The Humanities as a Discipline.” This may or may not be a “feature,” rather than “bug,” depending on the needs of a researcher. But in any case it means that a researcher needs to take care to ask Fellou to scale its searching well beyond the quota of 100 found items that I asked for in my prototype test to ensure that the results are representative of breadth. Fellou could usefully give the human researcher a better sense of how it chooses to collect from sources. For instance, is it looking for relatively short, discrete passages that pass the threshold of a relevancy score?"

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · Oct 6

Hi, Elisa! Yes, both literals (which would seem to be context-free) & hierarchical or other relationships (requiring context to discern) seem to be problems for some AI use cases.

Reposted by Frank Fischer

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · Oct 6

My blog post reporting on testing the use of agentic AI (the Fellou.ai browser) to start a research project on gathering definitions of the humanities: “Humanities Definitions Research Project: An Experiment with Agentic AI” (liu.english.ucsb.edu/humanities-d...).

Screenshots of the Fellou interface while its browser agent is in progress on a research task prompted by the user. (A) and (B) represent windows with multiple browser tabs open to searches. Each tab in these windows shows rapidly changing thumbnails of the websites, articles (including PDFs), and other materials that Fellou is currently searching and analyzing. A panel at the right of each window shows a partial view of the kinds of sources and topics Fellou has planned to search in response to the user’s prompt.
(C) is a window showing a periodically refreshed report on progress so far. In this window, the panel at the left shows in separate blocks some of the kinds of sources and topics that Fellou plans to search. The wide panel in the center summarizes results. And the panel at the right shows in blocks the specific sources and key phrases currently being “deep searched.”

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · Sep 25

Here's the table of contents of The Humanities Laboratory: From Design to Archaeology. I recommend the editors’ introduction, “What Goes on in Humanities Laboratories?” (9-62). It’s truly wonderful: rich, deep, thoughtful.

Table of contents of The Humanities Laboratory: From Design to Archaeology:

What Goes on in Humanities Laboratories? .............................................................9
Aleksandra Kil-Matlak, Jacek Małczyński, Dorota Wolska
Part 1: Humanities Laboratories
Chapter 1
The Tricky Case of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Laboratoire
d’Anthropologie Sociale................................................................................................65
Aleksandra Kil-Matlak, Jacek Małczyński, Dorota Wolska
Chapter 2
The Laboratory as a “Soap Bubble”: Juri Lotman, the Tartu–Moscow
School and the Laboratory of History and Semiotics.............................................87
Jacek Małczyński
Chapter 3
Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre: A Laboratory in
Search of the Truth................................................................................................... 139
Mirosław Kocur
Chapter 4
An Archaeology of Humanities Infrastructure: Paul Otlet and
Laboratorium Mundaneum..................................................................................... 175
Aleksandra Kil-Matlak
Chapter 5
The Private Banker of Academia: The Case of Aby Warburg’s
Laboratory of Cultural-Scientific Picture-History............................................... 213
Karolina Charewicz-Jakubowska
6 Contents
Part 2: Laboratorisation of the Humanities
Chapter 6
The Laboratory Effect: Laboratories in Leipzig at the Turn of the
Twentieth Century................................................................................................... 239
Krzysztof Łukasiewicz
Chapter 7
The Laboratorisation of the Field: The Formation of
the Anthropological Mode of Knowledge............................................................. 281
Adam Pisarek
Chapter 8
Jeremy Bentham and the Formation of the Laboratory of
Power-Knowledge.................................................................................................... 317
Rafał Nahirny
Part 3: The Post-Humanist Laboratory
Chapter 9
T…

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · Sep 25

Putting on my infrastructure studies hat to boost this just-published book: The Humanities Laboratory: From Design to Archaeology, edited by Aleksandra Kil-Matlak, Jacek Małczyński, & Dorota Wolska. www.peterlang.com/document/161...

Screenshot of Peter Lang publisher's web pat for The Humanities Laboratory: From Design to Archaeilogy. The page shows the book cover and a summary of the boojk. The summary reads:

"This book explores the epistemic status and potential of humanities laboratories. It investigates the history of such laboratories, while contributing to debates on designing contemporary forms of labs. The book traces the trend for laboratories in the humanities since the mid-nineteenth century, outlining a multitude of projects across diverse times and spaces.
We are interested in what makes humanities laboratories different from their scientific relatives. Can a humanities lab and those investigating natural sciences even be considered as related? Or should the relationship between them be seen transversally, outside of the opposition between the humanities and the natural and formal sciences?
We argue that the humanities laboratory should not be based on the idea of mimesis and imitate a scientific lab, but rather operate according to the principle of mimicry. Only in this way can the humanities fulfil their self-critical function."

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · Sep 24

“Liberal Arts Pantocrator” works into my argument short discussions of two early pictorial illustrations (by Herrad of Landsberg & Botticelli ) of the “seven liberal arts.”

Sandro Botticelli, A Young Man Being Introduced to the Seven Liberal Arts, 1483-1486 (fresco, detached and mounted on canvas). Public domain.

The fresco shows the figure of Grammar (one of the seven liberal arts) leading by the hand a “lord” (likely Lorenzo Tornabuoni of a Florentine banker family connected to the ruling House of Medici) into the semi-circle of the other seven liberal arts.

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · Sep 24

I made a short 3-page essay from part of my “Data Science & the Post-Liberal Arts University” in Critical Inquiry that had to be cut due to length: Liu, Alan. “Liberal Arts Pantocrator.” KCWorks, 24 Sept 2025, doi.org/10.17613/y9e...

Partial screenshot of first page of my "Liberal Arts Pantocrator" essay. The explanation at the top of the page reads:

"The following fragment discussing two early pictorial illustrations of the liberal arts was originally part of my article on “Data Science and the Post-Liberal Arts University” (Critical Inquiry 51, no. 4 (2025): 597–618) but had to be cut due to length limitations. The fragment complements the article’s final section on “A Post-Liberal Arts Curriculum (2),” which discusses what is “needed for the post-liberal arts to enhance existing efforts in the liberal arts to be more inclusive of their social margins and global peripheries—in particular, by acknowledging the heritage of applied knowledge embedded in the very notion of such margins and peripheries” (612-618)."

Reposted by Alan Liu

Aleksandra Kil-Matlak @aleksandrakil.bsky.social · Sep 23

Thrilled to announce “The Humanities Laboratory: From Design to Archaeology”, which I co-edited with Jacek Małczyński and the late, dearly remembered Dorota Wolska. www.peterlang.com/document/161...

Peter Lang Verlag - The Humanities Laboratory

This book explores the epistemic status and potential of humanities laboratories. It investigates the history of such laboratories, while contributing ...

www.peterlang.com

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · Sep 22

Just back from week as member of Santa Fe Institute’s working group on “The New New Science” with a group of mathematicians, computer scientists & (digital) humanists (www.santafe.edu/events/the-n...). Impressed by the quality of the conversations we had on math, humanities, modeling, and much else.

Screenshot of part of Santa Fe Institutute's web page announcing "The New New Science" working group event. The text shown on the page begins as follows (and is followed by the names of the working group organizers: Dan Rockmore, Renana Keydar, and Barak Sober):

Thaw Library - Miller Campus
Working Group
All day

September 15, 2025 – September 18, 2025

This working group brings together a small group of scholars with expertise spanning the humanities, mathematics, and computer science. Digital representations of knowledge and artistic corpora have opened new avenues for thinking about traditional Humanities subjects such as literature, linguistics, classics, and history and to rigorously examine mathematical and computational metaphors used in humanistic endeavors, while also exploring how a priori mathematical ideas can find meaning and epistemological value in humanistic subjects now considered natively digital.

Dan Rockmore, an organizer of the Santa Fe Institute working group on "The New New Science," at a whiteboard in the meeting room of the SFI's Miller campus where the group met. Various humanistic and mathematical ideas are scrawled or listed on the board.

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · Sep 22

CFP & flyer for 2026 Texas Tech U symposium on “AI & the Futures of the Human” where I will be a keynoter www.depts.ttu.edu/english/prog.... “How does the need to reconceive the humanities in the face of the rise of AI clarify, challenge, or transform our understanding of what it means to be human?”

Flyer for the 2026 Texas Tech U. Comparative Literature Sumposium on "Artificial Intelligence and the Futures of the Human" showing a view of the campus at the top and photos of the four keynote speakers at the bottom (Alan Liu, Kalindi Vora, Neda Atanasoski, Bruce Clarke). The flyer's abbreviated version of the symposium's call for papers reads as follow. (The QR code links to the full CFP.)

<quote>~~New Generations, New Critical Inspirations~~

In the age of AI, what are the place of the “human” in the humanities and the role of the “humanities” in defining the human? How do we—and how do literature, cinema, and art—reconsider creativity, meaning, and culture in a world where machines can generate and purport to interpret texts, images, and ideas? What new ethical, philosophical, and pedagogical challenges arise when human and machine intelligence intersect? And how does the need to reconceive the humanities in the face of the rise of AI clarify, challenge, or transform our understanding of what it means to be human?

This symposium brings together scholars, educators, artists, and technologists to reflect critically on the futures of humanistic inquiry and the futures of the human in the age of AI. We invite contributions that explore the opportunities and challenges AI presents for literature, history, philosophy, art, languages, and cultural studies.

Please send your (1) 100-word abstract, (2) 50-word bio-info, and (3)
questions to Dr. Y. Shu at eng.complit@ttu.edu by December 1, 2025
</quote>

Reposted by Meredith Broussard, Stephen R. Carpenter, Brendan Nyhan , and 23 more Meredith Broussard, Stephen R. Carpenter, Brendan Nyhan, David Dunning, Martin Paul Eve, Maxwell Palmer, Giovanna Mascheroni, Devon Greyson, Smith, Alan Richardson, Jacob T. Levy, Margot C. Finn, John Hogan, Bessma Momani, Joanna Tai, David Murakami Wood, Urška Demšar, Greg Linden, Philip Bell, Albin Wagener, Alan Liu, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Maksym Polyakov, Nathan P. Kalmoe, Gareth Terry, Carly D. Ziter

Prof Mike Yearworth @mikeyearworth.bsky.social · Sep 21

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits."

www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws

In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...

www.computerworld.com

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · Sep 6

That’s right. That was cutting-edge new tech at the time!

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · Sep 5

I once put many of these materials online on a site called “British Newspaper Coverage of the French Revolution” (Internet Archive copy of site: web.archive.org/web/20130704...).

British Newspaper Coverage of the French Revolution

web.archive.org

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · Sep 5

I found these while discarding boxes of old research notes and photocopies from the 1980s. In the digital age, it’s hard to believe how much labor of the basest kind was needed to harvest from archives, microfilm, etc.

Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · Sep 5

How research used to be! Pages from British newspapers during the French Revolution I once laboriously gathered from microfilm for my Wordsworth book by printing page parts to a photocopier & taping them together.

Scattered mass of phototopy pages (some with yellow Post-It notes, lying on a concrete surface. These are copies of pages from British newspapers & magazines covering the French Revolution (including London Times, Morning Chronicle, Morning Post, and Annual Register) that I harvested in the 1980s by printing page-parts from microfilm to a photocopier and then taping them together. I gathered these materials for my first monograph, Wordsworth: The Sense of History.

Reposted by Andreas Wagner, Henry Farrell, Tim Hitchcock , and 2 more Andreas Wagner, Henry Farrell, Tim Hitchcock, Jack Stilgoe, Alan Liu

Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · Aug 29

New preprint on "Computational Hermeneutics," co-authored by too many people to list in one post. TL;DR: GenAI is a cultural technology, and needs to be evaluated in ways that recognize situatedness, plurality, and ambiguity as the conditions of meaning — not noise to be minimized.

Computational Hermeneutics: Evaluating Generative AI as a Cultural Technology

<div> <div> <div> <p>Generative AI (GenAI) systems are increasingly recognized as cultural technologies, yet current evaluation frameworks often treat cul

papers.ssrn.com