The Voice of the Shuttle began in late 1994 as an introduction to the Web for humanists at the University of California, Santa Barbara. VoS became publicly accessible on March 21, 1995, when the Humanitas server on which it resided opened to global Web access. From its origin to October, 1999, VoS stayed at the same address on the Humanitas server. It grew in that period to over 70 pages of links to humanities and humanities-related resources on the Internet. Its mission has been to provide a structured and briefly annotated guide to online resources that at once respects the established humanities disciplines in their professional organization and points toward the transformation of those disciplines as they interact with the sciences and social sciences and with new digital media. (See such pages as Cultural Studies, Sci-Tech and Culture, Cyberculture, and Technology of Writing.) VoS emphasizes both primary and secondary (or theoretical) resources, and defines its audience as people who have something to learn from a higher-education, professional approach to the humanities (which in practice has included students and instructors from the elementary school, high school, and general population sectors).
Chronology of Development:
VoS was a solo effort by Alan Liu from 1994 to 1999 (with the exception of research assistance in 1996). Beginning in 1999, VoS has benefitted from more regular assistance in link maintenance and development. (See Credits.)
In Oct. 1999, VoS moved to a faster server at its present address: http://vos.ucsb.edu/
In Oct. 2001, after a year of development work, VoS was rebuilt as a database that serves content dynamically on the Web. In the process, it moved yet again to a set of interconnected Web and database servers managed by the UC Santa Barbara English Dept.
For a fuller narrative of the origins of VoS, see an excerpt from Alan Liu's article on "Globalizing the Humanities: Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research."
What the Title of VoS Means: (go to Myth.asp)
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