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ENG 397U Digital Humanities: Digital Literary Studies

Kathy Berens
Department: 

This class, Digital Literary Studies, examines four elements of the field.

• Close reading, “deformance,” and remix.
• Distant & Surface Reading: computers allow us to view the “surface” patterns of texts from the “distance” of large data sets rather than “close,” isolated passages.
• Archives and Databases: digital literary studies began with digital scholarly editions, which eventually became “unbound” from the book and were built as author- and theme-specific databases. We’ll study several, and contribute to some. We’ll learn how to “clean” data and do basic data visualizations.
• Cultural Studies: how search and metadata allow incredible facility in accessing information, but also can flatten lived human experience and render important details invisible. We’ll examine archives in the context of critical race theory and gender.

This course is both hands-on and theoretical. Student will write essays, build remix and collage, clean data, visualize data and aim to detect patterns. No prior knowledge of particular software is necessary. The course’s technical lessons adapt to the needs and prior experience of learners in the class. No pre-requisites are necessary.

Year: 
2016
Semester: 
Fall
Course Number: 
ENG 397U
discipline: