Alan Liu is a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of "Wordsworth: the Sense of History" and the developer of "The Voices of the Shuttle" (http: //vos.ucsb.edu), one of the earliest and most active humanities portals on the Web. His major online initiatives also include "Romantic Chronology" and "Palinurus: The Academy and the Corporation-Teaching the Humanities in a Restructured World,"