English
In the last ten years, the strange quasi-disciplinary formation known as DH or Digital Humanities has renewed the struggle over methods in literary studies. Analyses of digitized texts using computer-assisted techniques promise to transform the kinds of evidence, the methods of interpretation, and the modes of argument which matter to literary scholarship. Data is now a subject of energetic debate in literary studies: what constitutes literary data, and how should it be analyzed and interpreted? How might aggregation and quantification produce new knowledge in literary scholarship? What...
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Catalog Description 475 [DIVR] Digital Diversity 3 Course Prerequisite: Junior standing. Cultural impact of digital media in cultural contexts; issues of race, class, gender, sexuality online. (Crosslisted course offered as AMER ST 475, DTC 475, ENGLISH 475). Course Description DTC 475 is a continuation of the issues explored in DTC 206, DIGITAL INCLUSION. This course takes as its starting hypothesis the idea that various intersections of oppression exist in the manufacture, programming, design, and disposal of digital technologies. While this course will also explore how, for instance...
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This course surveys the current state of digital storytelling, examining topics ranging from digital curation to data journalism to social media activism (and beyond). We will consider the narrative conventions, multimodal dimensions, and mechanics of a wide range of digital stories, carefully examining both the tools available to creators and the theoretical perspectives that motivate their authors. Students will determine best practices for digital storytelling projects through their engagement with course readings, their participation in in-class workshop sessions where we experiment...
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This course introduces students to book history and scholarly editing through the frameworks of media studies and digital humanities. In this course, we will:
• learn basic bibliography;
• study literary texts as material documents, examining the relationship between form and meaning;
• trace the development of textual studies;
• challenge our expectations of both print and digital media;
• critically analyze a variety of digital humanities projects;
• explore remediation and other key concepts in media studies;
• and, of...
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For as long as anyone can remember, novelists like Gore Vidal and Phillip Roth have been sounding the death knell of narrative, killed off (we hear) by the rise of screen-based digital media. While it’s true that the sale of printed novels has declined, other forms of interactive storytelling – from video games to “netprov” and virtual reality fiction – have demonstrated how narrative persists , even prospers, in new media. In fact, in Japan, SMS technology has breathed new life into the novel through “cell phone literature,” a popular genre written and distributed in text-message-sized...
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We tend to imagine writing as mysterious and opaque – a gift of the Muses, that descends upon us in manic bursts of creative energy. As a result, we spend much of the time that we may have to write not writing but rather waiting to write: waiting for just the right mood, just the right place, just the right lighting, noise, or level of caffeination, in the hopes that inspiration may strike. (We’re all guilty of it!) It is the goal of this course to rid us of these beliefs and habits. Writing is, as any productive writer will tell you, not a lightning bolt of clarity but a slow and...
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The book’s role and significance within literary culture is being scrutinized today with an intensity unseen for five centuries. Nowhere is this questioning more acute, sophisticated, and nuanced than in the burgeoning field of the book arts, an umbrella term encompassing artists’ books, book sculpture, zines, and print-oriented forms of electronic poetry. This is an inherently collaborative and interdisciplinary field. Its practitioners skirt the thresholds between visual art and literature, technology and philosophy, producing uniquely bookish artifacts that defy easy categorization....
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This course has two complementary goals. The first is to introduce the history of technologies used to produce and circulate literature, from the parchment upon which Beowulf is written to the social media platforms exploited by netprov artists. This history provides a broad overview of the material conditions of possibility for the emergence of literary form and genre in the Anglophone tradition. The second goal is to examine how digital media are transforming scholarly publishing and communication by reflecting upon our own writing practices and their attendant technologies. By...
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Perhaps no single activity defines college more than reading. We read textbooks and text messages, perform “close readings” of literature and “read between the lines” of course descriptions. Some readings are dense, and we struggle to discern their meaning; other texts are skimmed quickly. We take our literacy for granted, giving barely a thought to the complex neurological processes that enable us to interpret these lines. In an age of artificial intelligences, even machines “read.” In this seminar, we explore the histories, sciences, and technologies of reading. Guest lectures and...
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How do you measure a book? Can machines read? Do we read prose texts now the way people read them in 1919 or in 1819? We are swimming in textual data that could change our understanding of the written word - if you have the right tools and know how to access and work with it. What could you learn to do with all these different forms of textuality, with all this data? Can you find connections between your current interests in literature and the perspectives that technology opens up, or the goals of your career? This course is meant to give you practice with a variety of methods and real-...
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