English
This course will consist of five modules with a combination of video, written materials, tutorials, and assigned readings. Modules each cover approximately three weeks of the semester, and end with either an online exam or a creative project. Each module will open on its scheduled date, and will include at least one video lecture recorded in advance. Remember that while this course is online, it is not self-paced: discussion topics open every week and are due at the end of the week, and the three scheduled exams and projects are due as listed in this syllabus and will not be accepted...
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We will examine how theoretical discourse has evolved through shifting technological platforms, with particular attention to the challenges software, code, and networks present to our understanding of texts. We will engage with examples of complex procedural works ranging from video games to electronic literature and social media. Each of these new platforms challenges our understanding of knowledge and how knowledge is circulated, curated, and redefined in a web-centric culture. Throughout the course, students will engage with current book-length scholarship on a variety of digital...
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How does the geography of New York City shape the literature of New York City? Does the literature shape the geography in return? In this course, we aim to understand the spatiotemporality of the Big Apple through novels of the 20th and 21st centuries that recreate and react to it. Not only will we read spatially, however, but we will also create spatially. Students will make maps that launch projects of geographical storytelling as a mode of literary analysis. More concretely, we will build online data repositories and exhibits (using JavaScript and HTML) that synthesize our reading...
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The goals of this course are to:
● explore a broad spectrum of cultural institutions to discover the range of approaches to providing access to material, both in physical and digital manifestations
● develop familiarity with a range of digital humanities and cultural heritage projects, as well as the ability to evaluate the tools and methods involved in creating those projects
● become more thoughtful, critical, and reflective users of digital tools, technologies, and spaces by understanding that all technologies are complex, socially situated, and...
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For more than a generation now, literary and cultural studies have operated amid the horizon of a historical turn—a sweeping deference to the almost palpable specificity of an acknowledged past, this deference governing projects across all major genres and periods. Increasingly, however, we see signs of what a 2011 volume of Continental philosophy named the speculative turn—or better, perhaps, acknowledging the Latin root speculat- (“to observe from a vantage point”), a speculative situation. Yet that situation is not one of philosophy only. “Speculation” is widely (if...
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The bite of lead type into handmade paper where ink pools in the recesses pressed by the weight of the letters; a literal subtext on the page surfaced through acts of erasure; the hot liquid polymers of 3D-printed objects, deposited in tiny incremental layers to make shapes; lines of circuitry written into lines of text and animated with current; a book that tweets at you; a book that is also a toy box; a book that becomes what the poet and printer William Blake 2 once called an “unnam’d form” (see last page of syllabus). Taught with the resources and facilities available in our BookLab...
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In the midst of the 2009 MLA Convention, Chronicle of Higher Education blogger William Pannapacker wrote, “Amid all the doom and gloom . . . one field seems to be alive and well: the digital humanities. More than that: Among all the contending subfields, the digital humanities seem like the first ‘next big thing’ in a long time, because the implications of digital technology affect every field.” More recently, ...
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This course explores the impact of digital technologies on notions of narrative or storytelling, examining how these technologies are changing the scope, definition, and ways of creating and experiencing the ‘literary’. We will examine works from four types of digital literature: 1) Writing Machines, or the intersection of the literary and digital 2 algorithms, formats, and programming languages; 2) Hypertext and Hypermedia; 3) Locative Narrative, which makes use of dynamic digital mapping technology to tell stories about and across material space; and 4) Digital Games and Narrative....
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What happens when books become screens? When narrative turns into an interactive multimedia experience on a tablet? When reading becomes augmented by statistical analysis and data visualization? When literature is less written than composed as a form of new media art? When communities of readers interact with texts and each other through digital networks? This class invites students to ask these and more questions about how our texts, reading, and interpretive practices are changing in a digital age. We will examine electronic texts as well as experimental books and apps; read...
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This course invites first-year students into a historically ranging, critically intensive, and hands-on learning environment about the technologies by which humans transmit our cultural inheritance and ideas. “Interpretive Machines” takes a long view of how we got to now, from the history of manuscripts, books, and print media to the opportunities for innovation in the digital present. It argues that 1) then and now, our technologies for sharing text, image, and data crucially shape the ideas which they convey, and 2) these contexts can help students plan and execute new mechanisms for...
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