Liu Talk April 27: 'Key Trends in Digital Humanities'

Alan Liu will give the talk, "Key Trends in Digital Humanities: How the Digital Humanities Challenge the Idea of the Humanities," Monday, April 27, at 7 p.m. in Smith Library of the Vaughan Literature Building at Bucknell University. [note change in time and location]

The talk, which is free and open to the public, is part of the Humanities Institute speaker series.

A professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Liu also is an affiliated faculty member of UCSB's Media Arts & Technology graduate program. Previously, he was on the faculty of Yale University's English Department and British Studies Program.

In his talk he will address the question, "How do such key methods in the digital humanities as data mining, mapping, visualization, social network analysis, and topic modeling make an essential difference in the idea of the humanities, and vice versa?"

Using examples of digital humanities research, Liu speculates on the large questions that confront the humanities in the face of computational media — most importantly, questions about the nature and function of interpretive "meaning."

The Humanities Institute Series is sponsored by the Office of the Provost, the Program in Comparative Humanities, the French and Francophone Studies Program, the Digital Scholarship Center, the University Lectureship Committee, and the Department of Art and Art History.