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Course Summary: General Expectations Like all other Spanish courses, Span 260 is a lot of work! Moreover, a literature course requires a little more discipline than a language course. You will be reading literary texts, in their original language and form, and some of these might be challenging. Therefore, you are expected to work on the material on a daily basis and to schedule yourself so that you have time to read the complete text, assimilate the material and participate in class. However, it is worth the work because it will help you solidify the background you built in previous Spanish courses and it will prepare you for future Spanish courses. Span 260 will be very helpful when you take more advanced literature and culture courses at UNC. In addition, please read carefully: 1. This will be a course with a Project Based Learning Component (PBL). What that means in practice is that throughout the semester part of our work will be conducted collaboratively towards the creation of an end of semester project. 2. A good percentage of the course-work, inside and outside of class will entail peer review and assessment. For each one of our modules there will be a session in which you will edit and correct your work collaboratively. 3. This course takes a Design Thinking/Digital approach to learning. For each one of our modules there will be a Lab session where we will learn to "think" digitally and to "design" with an end user in mind. The course itself is designed to teach you about the methodologies of literary analysis via incremental iterations of the same exercises. 4. We will also use other digital tools, most prominently googledocs and native digital humanities tools TBD.

Spanish and Spanish American literary works will help us understand how the Spanish language changes overtime, and challenge us to find answers for the above questions and many others in relation to linguistic attitudes and the historical construction of linguistic identity. Have you ever thought about the language you speak? If the answer is yes, surely you might have wondered: Where does my language come from? How does it change? What are its relationships with other languages? How do its literary and cultural production reflect such evolution and connections? In this course we will approach classic works of Spanish literature within the methodological frame of linguistic historiography, and the reading and analysis of these texts will help us understand how the Spanish language changes overtime, and challenge us to find answers for the above questions and many others in relation to linguistic attitudes and the historical construction of linguistic identity. The class will be interactive in format: class participation and joint efforts are very important. We do not have a textbook but a series of readings in Sakai that work like a course pack. We will have four CPR (Class Preparation Response), and work on a digital project which final products include a group presentation and a research and assessment portfolio.

What is “digital humanities” and how does it impact and intersect with the field of public humanities? Digital humanities work involves new approaches to reading, writing, research, publication, and curation: digital tools help us examine digital and non-digital material in innovative ways, and digital modes of communication help us reach new and wider ranges of audiences. This course provides students with the opportunity to create digital projects and utilize digital tools to further their academic and professional interests. Key questions that this course will cover include: How can digital tools and resources make cultural objects more accessible, engaging, and relevant to the personal and professional lives of various publics? What can working with a particular team of collaborators (the great people at PPL Special Collections) teach us about the benefits and challenges of digital preservation, digital archives, and digital curation (and, more generally, about the ways the long history of non-digital approaches to archives, preservation, and curation inform digital archives and curation)? 2 What is digital humanities, and how can public humanities practitioners productively collaborate, critique, revise, and reimagine the shape of this field through the practice of digital public humanities? How can I do cool things with digital tools, resources, and publication platforms? Who is doing cool things already?

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 with particular tools and publishing platforms, and their implementation of a digital storytelling project.

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 course, edit and curate literary texts!

Class sessions will consist of discussions of the assigned readings, collaborative analysis of sample projects, and workshops on various tools and technologies used to remediate literary texts in digital spaces.

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 snippets. This course considers what it means to tell stories in an age of digital media. We’ll begin by writing a traditional short story (fiction or creative non-fiction), focusing on plot and structure. We’ll then experiment with “translating” this narrative into a variety of new media forms. How does your story change when told as an interactive fiction? as a video game? as a hypertext novel? or on different platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook or Second Life? With each “translation,” we’ll read relevant texts on narratology and media theory as a way of giving us a shared vocabulary for discussing these new genres, and we’ll explore some of the best examples of creative writing in them. This course will be run as a workshop. While there will be a significant amount of reading (or playing, or watching, or listening) each week, emphasis will be on 1) learning some basic skills necessary to work within new media genres and 2) playfully, creatively experimenting with these skills. You’ll leave this course with a deeper understanding of the architecture of new media, including the World Wide Web and audiovisual forms like digital film and video games, as well as with a suite of basic technical literacies applicable across all disciplines.

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 steady process of composition, a word that literally means bringing together and arranging. It’s like building a house, or weaving a tapestry, requiring much planning and the steady assemblage of different pieces. In this class, we’ll be practicing this process of assemblage in networked digital spaces. Accordingly, this course is built around six key practices of digital composition: CONTRIBUTE, COLLECT, CURATE, COMPOSE, COMMUNICATE, and CUT-UP. Think of these verbs as prompts – as actions, moves, and compositional gestures – that we will be rehearsing and performing together at each stage of the semester. Practiced together in class and through small-scale exercises, they will provide a suite of skills that will help you frame and structure your own multimodal project.

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. These are artworks made not for the white walls of a gallery, but to be read and used; they are works of literature that engage the visual, tactile, and even olfactory senses. Difficult to reproduce in print editions or literary anthologies, they challenge our expectations of the codex as a platform for delivering and consuming textual information. Despite the diversity of the book arts, what brings these practices together is a shared interest in the potential of the book to model radical new forms of creativity, subjectivity, and political engagement. “if i can sing through my mouth with a book,” writes El Lissitzky in a treatise on book design, ”i can show myself in various guises.” Working directly with the Sloane Art Library’s extensive collection of artists’ books, this course will trace the book arts from their emergence as a semi-coherent set of avantgarde practices at the beginning of the twentieth century to their resurgence today with digital technologies. Because the book arts have not developed along a straightforward chronology, our route through time will not be linear. Rather, we will proceed by navigating the various social, political, and formal vectors that book artists have explored. Understanding how each artist situates her/himself along these vectors, and 2 what that placement can teach us about her/his aesthetic affiliations, will be the task of this course. When relevant, we will also be reading short stories, poems, and novels that address similar themes. By the end of the course, these vectors will together form a map detailing where the book has been, what it means to literary culture today, and the directions it is headed in the near future.