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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.

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 literature while exploring how computers can analyze and visualize language; and collaboratively document our experiences across a variety of social media platforms. Our works include classic as well as contemporary texts: some canonical, others experimental. This course requires no special technological skills beyond a basic familiarity with file management and the web. It welcomes students of any disciplinary persuasion, especially those curious to experiment in the classroom.

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 communication in the present. The course’s modules offer critical frameworks of background readings and discussions, a lab-like experience with the materials or skills involved, and applied projects for students to experiment with and study. “Interpretive Machines” aims to reward students moving into a variety of disciplines and programs. The course seeks to marry the critical insights of the humanities with the design-and-build impulses of engineering, blending NC State’s “Think and Do” motto into a discovery experience for first-year students. The course also provides a framework for critical and creative thinking as part of NC State University’s QEP program called “TH!NK.” These standards and behaviors of critical + creative thinking, useful in every academic context, are built into the course’s program of activities, many of which are also designed to help you reflect on these very skills (i.e. metacognition). Students will become adept at using the intellectual standards for critical + creative thinking in evaluating the work of others as well as proposing, analyzing, and arguing research questions related to this course’s content.

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 methods are most appropriate for grappling with the enormous, and enormously messy, world of digitized literary texts and data about literature? This course pursues two aims in parallel: to engage with the history and current practice of literary data analysis, and to introduce the foundational skills of literary data analysis in the R programming language. Class time will be divided between seminar and practical instruction. The seminar discussions trace theoretical debates about literary data from structuralism and scientific bibliography, to experiments in computational stylistics, to contemporary scholarly controversies in and around DH. The practicum surveys the fundamentals of programming and data manipulation, with an introduction to selected numerical techniques and data visualizations. Short homework exercises supplement the in-class instruction, with an emphasis on handling actual literary data of various kinds. There are two major assignments. A short position paper on a theoretical question about literary data and DH is due at midterm. The final assignment is to plan, carry out, and report on a smallscale project in literary data analysis. This project is to be undertaken in small groups; the report will detail methods and interpretations together with code and data. No special technical expertise of any kind is expected; instruction begins from first principles. However, the work of programming does require willingness to experiment, patience in the face of frustration, and the nerve to ask for help as often as needed. Bring your own laptop to class, if you have one; loaner laptops will also be available for in-class workshops. MacOS X and Linux are the preferred operating systems for work in the course, but Windows will be accommodated as well.

This course is an introduction to digital technology and culture that integrates interdisciplinary knowledge from literary studies, rhetoric and composition, art and design, business, and sociology to prepare students for the technical and cultural challenges of the 21st century. While this class is committed to introducing students to the history and culture of digital technology, it will also provide students with hands-on experiences with digital tools and delve into questions about what makes something digital and how we conceptualize our lives beyond the digital.

DTC 375 is an introduction to the historical relationships between technology, communication, and forms of writing. The course gives students an appreciation of the technological history of media, including hands-on encounters with the components, programs, and signals that create various technological effects: from sound to graphics to characters to tactile effects. Divided into the three unit s exploring the history of media that most directly impacted the development of the computer (sound, vision, and text), DTC 375 explores how these media transformed our senses and our techniques of interacting with the world.

DTC 356 explores the cultural, aesthetic, and political roles of information and data. Beginning with library classification systems and the structures of Wikipedia, this course then turns to the technological and engineering aspects of data as it is disseminated worldwide, while also exploring how visualization techniques use art and metaphor to communicate complex data to multiple audiences. The course ends with a consideration of hackers and cyberwar, exploring the methods used to strike digital infrastructures and control global populations.

DTC 392 explores the cultural and historical impact of video games. We will learn about these issues by engaging in a semester-long project where we will prototype a video game. Video games are not just entertainment: they can be art, a form of political resistance, even a way to persuade other people. You’ll share your prototype with your fellow students, question each other’s assumptions, read research in game studies, and study gaming cultures.