Lydia H Liu
Biographic Data
| ID | 279004 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lydia H Liu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lydia H |
| FAMILY NAME | Liu |
| SIGNATURE | LIU L H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 66 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
After Turing: How Philosophy Migrated to the AI Lab
What happens to philosophy when philosophical activities migrate to the AI lab? My article explores the philosophical work that has gone into the machine simulations of language and understanding after Alan Turing. The early experiments by AI practitioners such as Karen Spärck Jones, Richard Richens, Yorick Wilks, and others at the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) led to the creation of the machine interlingua, semantic networks, and other…
Wittgenstein in the Machine
This article brings to light how AI research has benefited from post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. My research shows that Wittgenstein’s work began to engage the attention of AI researchers not only in the 1970s down to the present but right from the early beginnings of computational research in the 1950s. More specifically, his later philosophy inspired a group of researchers called the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) to start one of the f…
The Incalculable: Thoughts on the Collapse of the Biosecurity Regime
This short essay, originally published in May 2020 as a blog piece, reflects on Covid-19 by asking how the most powerful biosecurity regime of the world has failed, why the analogy with the Spanish flu is misleading, and how the racist fantasy of world domination cannot reckon with the unintended consequences of its own logic
The Humanities in China and Taiwan Today
Are the humanities in trouble in China and Taiwan, such as we witness elsewhere in the world? In her brief commentary, Lydia H. Liu reflects on the contributions by Wang Hui and Fan-sen Wang, who offer illuminating analyses of the state of the humanities in contemporary China and Taiwan. In the past, upward mobility in East Asian societies often depended on one's hard work and superior command of the Confucian classics. Today, the legacy of merit…
The Question of Meaning-Value in the Political Economy of the Sign
Shadows of Universalism: The Untold Story of Human Rights around 1948
The Ghost of Arthur H. Smith in the Mirror of Cultural Translation
Arthur H. Smith’s Chinese Characteristics (1890) remained the most widely read American book on China until Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1931). Smith’s collection of pungent and humorous essays, originally written for white expatriates in Asia, was accepted by Americans at home as a wise and authentic handbook. The book was soon translated into Japanese (1896), classical Chinese (1903), and at least three more times into Chinese since 1990. The c…
The Cybernetic Unconscious: Rethinking Lacan, Poe, and French Theory
Injury: Incriminating Words and Imperial Power
Life as Form: How Biomimesis Encountered Buddhism in Lu Xun
The fraught encounters between biological sciences and religions such as Buddhism have raised philosophical issues for many. This essay will focus on one of them: Can form ground the truth of life? The author suggests that, along with the introduction of evolutionary biology from Europe, literary realism in China has emerged as a technology of biomimesis, among other such technologies, to grapple with the problem of "life as form." Focusing on Lu…
ISpace: Printed English after Joyce, Shannon, and Derrida
To begin my essay with a nonword or borderline word is to relive the consequence of manifest entanglements between the literary imagination and technoscience. iSpace is one of many graphic aberrations introduced into English by James Joyce. There are others, of course—printed signs on paper as well as electronic pulses on the computer screen—that can go anywhere from exuberant nonsense to promised logographical embodiment: “alaphbedic,” “televisi…
Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan
Legislating the Universal: The Circulation of International Law in the Nineteenth Century
Beijing Sojourners in New York: Postsocialism and the Question of Ideology in Global Media Culture
Research Article| August 01 1999 Beijing Sojourners in New York: Postsocialism and the Question of Ideology in Global Media Culture Lydia H. Liu Lydia H. Liu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (1999) 7 (3): 763–798. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-7-3-763 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Lydia H. Liu; Beijing Sojourners in New York: Postsocialism and the Question of Ideolo…
The Desire for the Sovereign and the Logic of Reciprocity in the Family of Nations
It may sound like a truism that the modern nation cannot imagine itself except in sovereign terms. But what is this truism saying or, rather, withholding from us? When Benedict Anderson wrote his influential study of nationalism in 1983, he circumscribed the imagining of the nation as "both inherently limited and sovereign" and relied on this basic understanding to explain the global transformation of dynastic empires into nation-states [Imagined…
Robinson Crusoe's Earthenware Pot
How was the value of porcelain differentiated from soft-paste ceramics in 18th century Europe? Why was the difference important to the merchants, scientists, collectors, and novelists of the time? This essay explores the economic and technological rivalries between European and China by reexamining Daniel Defoe's novel "Robinson Crusoe" and its silences or colonial disavowals
Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity: China, 1900-1937
Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity-China, 1900-1937
Strange Tales from Strange Lands: Stories by Zheng Wanlong. Kam Louie
Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900-1937
Are languages incommensurate? If so, how do people establish and maintain hypothetical equivalences between words and their meanings? What does it mean to translate one culture into the language of another on the basis of commonly conceived equivalences? This study—bridging contemporary theory, Chinese history, comparative literature, and culture studies—analyzes the historical interactions among China, Japan, and the West in terms of "translingu…
Translingual Practice: The Discourse of Individualism between China and the West
The Cybernetic Unconscious: Rethinking Lacan, Poe, and French Theory
Shadows of Universalism: The Untold Story of Human Rights around 1948
Robinson Crusoe's Earthenware Pot
How was the value of porcelain differentiated from soft-paste ceramics in 18th century Europe? Why was the difference important to the merchants, scientists, collectors, and novelists of the time? This essay explores the economic and technological rivalries between European and China by reexamining Daniel Defoe's novel "Robinson Crusoe" and its silences or colonial disavowals
The Desire for the Sovereign and the Logic of Reciprocity in the Family of Nations
It may sound like a truism that the modern nation cannot imagine itself except in sovereign terms. But what is this truism saying or, rather, withholding from us? When Benedict Anderson wrote his influential study of nationalism in 1983, he circumscribed the imagining of the nation as "both inherently limited and sovereign" and relied on this basic understanding to explain the global transformation of dynastic empires into nation-states [Imagined…
Beijing Sojourners in New York: Postsocialism and the Question of Ideology in Global Media Culture
Research Article| August 01 1999 Beijing Sojourners in New York: Postsocialism and the Question of Ideology in Global Media Culture Lydia H. Liu Lydia H. Liu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (1999) 7 (3): 763–798. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-7-3-763 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Lydia H. Liu; Beijing Sojourners in New York: Postsocialism and the Question of Ideolo…
Translingual Practice: The Discourse of Individualism between China and the West
ISpace: Printed English after Joyce, Shannon, and Derrida
To begin my essay with a nonword or borderline word is to relive the consequence of manifest entanglements between the literary imagination and technoscience. iSpace is one of many graphic aberrations introduced into English by James Joyce. There are others, of course—printed signs on paper as well as electronic pulses on the computer screen—that can go anywhere from exuberant nonsense to promised logographical embodiment: “alaphbedic,” “televisi…
Wittgenstein in the Machine
This article brings to light how AI research has benefited from post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. My research shows that Wittgenstein’s work began to engage the attention of AI researchers not only in the 1970s down to the present but right from the early beginnings of computational research in the 1950s. More specifically, his later philosophy inspired a group of researchers called the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) to start one of the f…
Life as Form: How Biomimesis Encountered Buddhism in Lu Xun
The fraught encounters between biological sciences and religions such as Buddhism have raised philosophical issues for many. This essay will focus on one of them: Can form ground the truth of life? The author suggests that, along with the introduction of evolutionary biology from Europe, literary realism in China has emerged as a technology of biomimesis, among other such technologies, to grapple with the problem of "life as form." Focusing on Lu…
The Incalculable: Thoughts on the Collapse of the Biosecurity Regime
This short essay, originally published in May 2020 as a blog piece, reflects on Covid-19 by asking how the most powerful biosecurity regime of the world has failed, why the analogy with the Spanish flu is misleading, and how the racist fantasy of world domination cannot reckon with the unintended consequences of its own logic
The Ghost of Arthur H. Smith in the Mirror of Cultural Translation
Arthur H. Smith’s Chinese Characteristics (1890) remained the most widely read American book on China until Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1931). Smith’s collection of pungent and humorous essays, originally written for white expatriates in Asia, was accepted by Americans at home as a wise and authentic handbook. The book was soon translated into Japanese (1896), classical Chinese (1903), and at least three more times into Chinese since 1990. The c…
Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900-1937
Are languages incommensurate? If so, how do people establish and maintain hypothetical equivalences between words and their meanings? What does it mean to translate one culture into the language of another on the basis of commonly conceived equivalences? This study—bridging contemporary theory, Chinese history, comparative literature, and culture studies—analyzes the historical interactions among China, Japan, and the West in terms of "translingu…
Translingual Practice: The Discourse of Individualism between China and the West
Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900-1937
Are languages incommensurate? If so, how do people establish and maintain hypothetical equivalences between words and their meanings? What does it mean to translate one culture into the language of another on the basis of commonly conceived equivalences? This study—bridging contemporary theory, Chinese history, comparative literature, and culture studies—analyzes the historical interactions among China, Japan, and the West in terms of "translingu…
Strange Tales from Strange Lands: Stories by Zheng Wanlong. Kam Louie
Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity-China, 1900-1937
Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity: China, 1900-1937
Legislating the Universal: The Circulation of International Law in the Nineteenth Century
Beijing Sojourners in New York: Postsocialism and the Question of Ideology in Global Media Culture
Research Article| August 01 1999 Beijing Sojourners in New York: Postsocialism and the Question of Ideology in Global Media Culture Lydia H. Liu Lydia H. Liu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (1999) 7 (3): 763–798. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-7-3-763 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Lydia H. Liu; Beijing Sojourners in New York: Postsocialism and the Question of Ideolo…
The Desire for the Sovereign and the Logic of Reciprocity in the Family of Nations
It may sound like a truism that the modern nation cannot imagine itself except in sovereign terms. But what is this truism saying or, rather, withholding from us? When Benedict Anderson wrote his influential study of nationalism in 1983, he circumscribed the imagining of the nation as "both inherently limited and sovereign" and relied on this basic understanding to explain the global transformation of dynastic empires into nation-states [Imagined…
Robinson Crusoe's Earthenware Pot
How was the value of porcelain differentiated from soft-paste ceramics in 18th century Europe? Why was the difference important to the merchants, scientists, collectors, and novelists of the time? This essay explores the economic and technological rivalries between European and China by reexamining Daniel Defoe's novel "Robinson Crusoe" and its silences or colonial disavowals
Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan
ISpace: Printed English after Joyce, Shannon, and Derrida
To begin my essay with a nonword or borderline word is to relive the consequence of manifest entanglements between the literary imagination and technoscience. iSpace is one of many graphic aberrations introduced into English by James Joyce. There are others, of course—printed signs on paper as well as electronic pulses on the computer screen—that can go anywhere from exuberant nonsense to promised logographical embodiment: “alaphbedic,” “televisi…
Injury: Incriminating Words and Imperial Power
Life as Form: How Biomimesis Encountered Buddhism in Lu Xun
The fraught encounters between biological sciences and religions such as Buddhism have raised philosophical issues for many. This essay will focus on one of them: Can form ground the truth of life? The author suggests that, along with the introduction of evolutionary biology from Europe, literary realism in China has emerged as a technology of biomimesis, among other such technologies, to grapple with the problem of "life as form." Focusing on Lu…
The Cybernetic Unconscious: Rethinking Lacan, Poe, and French Theory
The Ghost of Arthur H. Smith in the Mirror of Cultural Translation
Arthur H. Smith’s Chinese Characteristics (1890) remained the most widely read American book on China until Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1931). Smith’s collection of pungent and humorous essays, originally written for white expatriates in Asia, was accepted by Americans at home as a wise and authentic handbook. The book was soon translated into Japanese (1896), classical Chinese (1903), and at least three more times into Chinese since 1990. The c…
Shadows of Universalism: The Untold Story of Human Rights around 1948
The Question of Meaning-Value in the Political Economy of the Sign
The Humanities in China and Taiwan Today
Are the humanities in trouble in China and Taiwan, such as we witness elsewhere in the world? In her brief commentary, Lydia H. Liu reflects on the contributions by Wang Hui and Fan-sen Wang, who offer illuminating analyses of the state of the humanities in contemporary China and Taiwan. In the past, upward mobility in East Asian societies often depended on one's hard work and superior command of the Confucian classics. Today, the legacy of merit…
Wittgenstein in the Machine
This article brings to light how AI research has benefited from post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. My research shows that Wittgenstein’s work began to engage the attention of AI researchers not only in the 1970s down to the present but right from the early beginnings of computational research in the 1950s. More specifically, his later philosophy inspired a group of researchers called the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) to start one of the f…
The Incalculable: Thoughts on the Collapse of the Biosecurity Regime
This short essay, originally published in May 2020 as a blog piece, reflects on Covid-19 by asking how the most powerful biosecurity regime of the world has failed, why the analogy with the Spanish flu is misleading, and how the racist fantasy of world domination cannot reckon with the unintended consequences of its own logic
After Turing: How Philosophy Migrated to the AI Lab
What happens to philosophy when philosophical activities migrate to the AI lab? My article explores the philosophical work that has gone into the machine simulations of language and understanding after Alan Turing. The early experiments by AI practitioners such as Karen Spärck Jones, Richard Richens, Yorick Wilks, and others at the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) led to the creation of the machine interlingua, semantic networks, and other…
History (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · China (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Chinese history and philosophy (8 works) · Law (8 works) · History (7 works)