Alan Liu is Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford Univ. Press, 1989); The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004); and Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (forthcoming, Univ. of Chicago Press). He is principal investigator of the UC Multi-campus Research Group, Transliteracies: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading; principal investigator of the UCSB Transcriptions Project (Literature and the Culture of Information); and co-director of his English Department's undergraduate specialization on Literature and the Culture of Information.