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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/
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Scott Newstok today sent me a list of scholarship on machine learning/AI & “close reading” (and related materials) culled from his Close Reading Archive, with permission to share. I’ve put it up in a post: liu.english.ucsb.edu/machine-lear...

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Learned from Scott Newstok of this study of large language models that evaluates their use for "1) close reading as a form of reasoning … 2) college-level knowledge in the literary domain & 3) figurative language understanding as ... reading comprehension” arxiv.org/abs/2505.09825

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

Age perspective is so rarely considered in leading-edge work in humanities and arts. As in other areas such as music, science, programming—edgy, avant-garde work is a Brooklyn, as it were, of early to mid-career professionals and creatives. What does such work look like to the young & old?

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

In my experience, an author's writings have a short half-life for their own author. I rarely read my publications after a year or so. Someone reminded me of my 1996 essay, “The New Historicism and the Work of Mourning.” Surprised by my earlier self. it's pretty good. www.jstor.org/stable/25601...

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

I was absorbed by NY Times Style issue “J Is for Japan.” @ligayamishan.bsky.social’s essay on “Darker Side of Japan’s Love of Cuteness” is wonderful—richly extending works like Sianne Ngai’s on cuteness in the specific register of all things astro_boy & hello_kitty. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/t...

submitted 9 days ago • 2 comments