Transcriptions/Literature.Culture.Media

LCI Specialization

The UCSB English Department encourages upper-division students with particular literary/critical interests to pursue them formally by selecting one of the new specializations in the major. The specialization in Literature & Culture of Information (supervised by the LCM) brings the perspective of the humanities to the concept of “information” that many students will engage with professionally and personally all their lives. In particular, LCI compares the forms, media, institutions, and aesthetics of the “information revolution” to similar revolutions in the past—e.g., the print revolution. The goal is to ask what the “well-read” have to offer the “well-informed,” and vice versa. What was beautiful, enlightening, or cruel in the project of orality or literacy and their literatures? How does the project of information compare? And how might the insights of past ages of language be used to improve our contemporary age? Courses offered by the specialization in Literature and the Culture of Information hybridize the theory, practice, and literature of contemporary information culture with studies of the earlier information media of oral discourse, manuscripts, and print and the literature they embodied.

Requirements

LCI students must be English majors at UCSB. Requirements are any 4 elective courses in the Literature and the Culture of Information specialization. LCI students are also invited to participate each year in such special events as a colloquium, discussion with a faculty member or visiting scholar, or field trip to an organization related to information culture. Upon graduating from UCSB, LCI students receive a certificate of completion in the LCI specialization from the English Department.

To sign up for the specialization or for information about course requirements, etc., contact Ann Wainwright, English Department Staff Undergraduate Advisor (wainwright at english.ucsb.edu; 893-8711). For other information about the specialization, contact its co-directors, Prof. Alan Liu (ayliu at english.ucsb.edu) and Rita Raley (raley at english.ucsb.edu).

LCI project archive

Graduate programs of interest for LCI students

• UCSC Digital Arts and New Media (MFA program)

The Literature.Culture.Media (LCM) Center continues the work in digital humanities and new media begun in 1998 by the Transcriptions project. Our overall goal is “to build a working paradigm of a humanities department of the future that takes the information revolution to its heart as something to be seriously learned from, wrestled with, and otherwise [...]