Literature and Culture of Information (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 and the Culture of Information (supervised by the department's Transcriptions Project) 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, Literature and the Culture of Information 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.

(Source: LCI Specialization at UBSB English Department's webpage)