Syllabus:Digital Humanities

Syllabus

Spring 2015
ENGL 6277: Problems in Literary Criticism
M 4:00 - 6:00 HS 343 - Seminar Room
M C Morgan - HS 314 - mmorgan@bemidjistate.edu - @mcmorgan
Course url: http://erhetoric.org/dh/

Public Learning Gaols

Encounter reading: fast, slow, close, automatic, systematic, extra.
Encounter method: describe - analyze - interpret
Encounter: reread - rewrite - remix - repurpose - share
Become conversant with theories, issues, artifacts of digital literature / poetics
Court serendipity by propinquity
Others not mentioned here

New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (Leonardo Book Series) Paperback – September 18, 2009
by Adalaide Morris (Editor), Thomas Swiss  (Editor) ISBN-13: 978-0262513388  ISBN-10: 0262513382

Reading Moving Letters: Digital Literature in Research and Teaching. A Handbook (Media Upheavals)Paperback – February 5, 2010 by Roberto Simanowski (Editor) ISBN-13: 978-3837611304  ISBN-10: 3837611302

Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (Modernist Literature & Culture) Paperback – January 31, 2014
by Jessica Pressman  (Author) ISBN-13: 978-0199937103  ISBN-10: 0199937109

Other texts online as assigned or recommended.

Procedure

Weekly Pre-Processing

Read: Chapters or articles in the text.
Read: The literary works referred to, online or by download.
Search: Terms, names, movements you're not familiar with. Google.
Make Notes: Draft a couple pages of notes addressing the current reading and previous discussions. Make this public thinking. Questions for debate and consideration.

Multi-Processing

Public: Meet M 4:00 - 6:40 to discuss, practice, question, review, reveal, read in collective. Seminar stuff. More note taking. Googling.

Weekly Post-Processing

Revise and append notes, re-read, re-think, re-consider, re-tell. Create your own database.

Until When

date is not Apr 27

THEN

repeat

ELSE

TheLitCritProject
TheLitCritFinal

ENDIF

Possible Projects

glossary
map of the territories
20 minute paper
remix: any media
...

The Weeks

For 2 Feb

Pressman, chap 3, and accoutrements
YHCHI
Transcription. Spolier. Thank yous to Jessica at UCLA whoever she might be. (ahem).
Art Blakey, 1958, YouTube.

Simultaneity

Nude Descending a Staircase,
Musical-Instruments-Georges-Braque, 1908
Violin and Glass, Braque, 1913: "Violin and Glass (1913) reflects the culmination of Braque’s interest in simultaneous perspective and geometric forms, ideas he cultivated while working side by side with Picasso. Braque’s close collaboration with the artist was fruitful but brief, lasting only until 1914, when the French painter decided to go to the trenches, fighting for his country during W.W.I."
Picasso_Woman-Playing-Mandolin

For 26 Jan

Read Pressman, intro, and chaps 1 - 2
Read/work with/make notes on reading
Read (!) Project for the Tachistoscope

For 9 Feb

Pressman, chap 4. Read The Jew's Daughter, and anything else that needs reading.
Info on My Molly (departed)
Ithaca PDF or text. Ulysses, 1922 edition, at U Victoria.

For 16 Feb

If you haven't, start to read afternoon: a story, to get a sense of what first-generation hypertext was about. Read the directions. Don't be fooled by the naive look of the text. afternoon is sophisticated hypertext narrative.
Read Chroma. In 3 - 5 minute chapters.
Nippon, by YHCHI.

For chap 6: Coda

Visit the Only Revolutions site. It has something in common with the digi lit we've been reading. The forums (a database) are interesting in that readers are sharing reading strategies.
A few images of Only Revolutions, here.

For 23 Feb

Update 22 Feb 2015: Class cancelled for 23 Feb. Use the time to read-review and research-update.

Update on reading digital literature: If your computer slows down or the fans come on when you're reading some of the literature, it's benign. Some Flash productions demand a lot of computing power. Bear with it. Be patient. There's nothing wrong.

For 2 Mar

From Simanowski, et al, Reading Moving Letters

Simanowski, Reading Digital Literature."
Wardrip-Fruin, "Five Elements of Digital Literature."
Zuern, "Figures in the Interface."

Touching Words, Talan Memmott and others discuss aesthetics at the Bristol docklands.
Rudy Lemcke, The Uninvited and other video work.
Stories Beneath Your Feet. Lecture. Stories Beneath Your Feet and Fingertips: Playing Locative Stories by Kathi Inman Berens.
Along the Briny Beach, J R Carpenter
The Flat. Multimodal storytelling

For 16 Mar

Koskimaa, "Approaches to Digital Literature," pp 129ff
Koskimaa, "Teaching Digital Literature ...," pp 299ff
Ensslin, "From Revisi(tati)on to Retro-Intentionalism," pp 145ff
Ensslin and Pope, " Digital Literature in Creative and Media Studies," 311ff

Some works mentioned in the reading

These Waves of Girls. Multimedial hyperfiction.
Wanderkammer, J.R. Carpenter. Part of Walk poems
Mobius Case
Inkubus, by Andy Campbell and Christine Wilks
Inanimate Alice

Supplemental Reading

this sea is nothing in sight but isles.A demonstration of procedural processing.
READWRITEGARDEN.PDF. Carpenter walks through a procedural poetry generator.
These Wavs of Memories, Koskimaa. Example of how digital literary criticism proceeds. "The challenge for e-lit criticism, posed by works like These Waves of Girls, is thus to combine all the complexity of literary criticism with all the complexities hyper and cybertextual programming creates, without reducing the work to only one of its multiple dimensions."
Procedural Literacy: Educating the New Media Practitioner, Michael Mateas. What the professional reader needs to know. See also Wardrip-Fruin, "Learning to Read Digital Literature."
A critique of procedural poetry. Poetweet. Poetry generator from twitter streams, with procedural process parody. Because procedural poetry isn't real.

for 23 Mar

Saemmer, "Digital Literature - A Question of Style."
Goicoechea, "The Reader in Cyberspace."
Strehovec, "Alphabet on the Move."

Works

mez: datableed
The Dreamlife of Letters
Sous Terre. Requires Flash
Crowds and Power Some links seem to create new browser windows.
TheHouse, Flanagan. "As in much of electronic literature, the experience of the work as an intimate, interactive, screen-based piece is essential to understanding and appreciating it. Indeed, the work is only realized through user interaction and navigation. How does everyday spatial practice bring into focus the relationship between code, language, and relationships? What are the key characteristics of digital relationships as seen through this light? Does the recurring emphasis on process, chance, and interactivity also function as an indicator of larger questions about the chance writing of the text? The poem presented is autobiographical in nature yet engages the conceptualization of both language and embodiment as the text creates its own types of organism."

Supplemental reading

Pragmatics of the Link, Pajares
Patterns of Hypertext, Bernstein.
A critique of procedural poetry. Poetweet. Poetry generator from twitter streams, with procedural process parody. Because procedural poetry isn't real.

for 30 Mar

New Media Poetics: Chap 1, and all of part III.
Jim Rosenberg
Project Xanadu
Discussion of projects

Apr 6

no meeting: working on projects

Apr 13

no meeting: working on projects

Apr 20

Projects

Kevin McCauley. Old Man on the Beach, and Notes on the Project on Kevin's blog.
Dean Brookes: Night Patrol, South Vietnam (Third Draft), and Notes on the Project on Dean's blog.
Amy Moschkau
Casey Fisher
Andy Hotzler

Apr 27

Present projects. Sign up.

Sarah Barott
Zach VanDrunen: Digital Literature Database. A record of the course in a wiki.
Brittany Goettlich
Susan Johnson: Screencast Close Reading
Joel Verschay: Burial in Nebraska

Housekeeping

I'd like to put your work for the project online as examples of what we're doing in lit crit and the Digital Humanities. I'll add links to this page for the semester. Then over this summer, I'll be posting them to the nascent Digital Humanities Hub.

If your work lives online already, email me the appropriate urls. If you're submitting documents, I'll convert them to PDF or html and post them on the erhetoric.org server. (Links included in a Word doc will work online.)

And finally, Course Evaluation

Digital Humanities : ProblemsInLitCritDigitalLitSyllabus