Digital Literary Studies
Dr.
Jennifer Travis
Department of English
Office: St. John's Hall, B40-1
Telephone: Ext. 5608
Skype: jtprofessor
Email : travisj@stjohns.edu
. Please be in touch via email rather than phone. I will return your message within 24 hours. Thanks!
Student Hours: I am always happy to meet with you in my office during posted office hours. If these times do not work for you, I will try to coordinate with your schedule and/or we can Skype.
Course Description: Digital technologies are changing all aspects of how we access, analyze, and conceptualize information. This course investigates how digital technologies affect the way we read, study, and understand literature. It also introduces students to a rapidly growing field of study known as the digital humanities. From the digitization of printed texts to the analysis of texts using machine algorithms, the course will familiarize students with digital humanities practices and examine the ways in which digital humanities poses significant challenges to familiar assumptions in literary study, from how we read to the meaning of authorship.
Course Format: This course is a seminar. Class time will be spent primarily in dialogue and discussion rather than lecture. Everyone should come to class prepared and ready to participate.
Grades will be based on “weekly create” assignments, course project(s), and class participation.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
Readings posted on our website and syllabus.
The Weekly Create: The weekly create is an opportunity to explore a new tool, remake, mash-up, and otherwise comment on course readings and discussion through visual, textual, and/or audio/video. We will share these in class.
Zotero bibliography : collaborative bibliography of DH works.
Blogging/Tweeting : weekly
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Final Project: CommentPress collaboration (more to follow).
Participation: Each student will have the opportunity to lead the class discussion.
WEEK ONE: INTRODUCTION
Course technologies (WordPress, Zotero, Twitter), readings, projects.
WEEK TWO: What is Digital Humanities?
September 11:
McGann, "Radiant Textuality"
Kirschenbaum, "What is Digital Humanities and what is it doing in English
Departments?"
"Humanities to Digital Humanities" in Digital Humanities (Burdick, Drucker,
Lunenefeld, Presner, Schnapp).
Literary Studies in the Digital Age, “Introduction”
All the articles in The New York Times
’ series, “Humanities 2.0”
The Weekly Create: DH and you. How does DH challenge, support, rethink, expand your approach to literary studies, past and/or future?
WEEK THREE: Ways of Reading: Close and Distant
September 18:
Hayles, "How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine" (see also video on website)
Moretti " Conjectures in World Literature"
Clement,
“Text Analysis, Data Mining, and Visualizations in Literary Scholarship” in
Literary Studies in the Digital Age
Dowling, "Escaping the Shallows: Deep Reading"
Hoover,
“Textual Analysis”
in Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving
Anthology (open source ebook linked in week one)
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Witmore, "Text: A Massively Addressable Object" in Debates in the Digital
Humanities (open source ebook)
Weekly Create : Use Google ngram to track the usage of a term of your choosing, and/or explore a tool on Tapor to visualize a text/passage/poem.
WEEK FOUR: September 25: NO CLASS
WEEK FIVE: Course Technologies with Caroline Fuchs, Library
October 2:
Building a class bibliography using Zotero
Following scholarship online using Twitter
Writing collaboratively using Google Docs/CommentPress
Blogging using WordPress
Weekly Create: Add to our Zotero bibliography.
Find one or two DH tweeters to follow and blog or tweet a response or retweet a post.
WEEK SIX: Electronic Editions
October 9:
Harriet Beecher Stowe, from the National Era edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Walt Whitman, selections from the Whitman Archive
Martha Nell Smith ,
“Electronic Scholarly Editing”
Digital Dickinson
Kenneth Price, “Electronic Scholarly Editions” Willa Cather
Willa Cather Digital
Archive
Weekly Create: Evaluate a DH project/database/edition/archive of your choosing.
When evaluating a digital humanities project, ask yourself the following questions:
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•
What contribution does it make to scholarship?
•
What is being done with this project that could not be done in print-based scholarship?
•
Is the purpose of the site/project/archive clearly articulated?
•
Is the site easy to navigate?
•
How can you use it for your research?
•
Is it aesthetically pleasing? Is it searchable? static?
•
Who are the authors/contributors? Their roles?
•
Is it a collaborative project?
•
Who is the primary audience?
•
What are the strengths? What are the weaknesses?
*Adapted from Caroline Fuchs, University Libraries, CTL handout
WEEK SEVEN: Collaborative Learning and Making
October 16:
Fitzpatrick, "Networking the Field"
Earhart, "Challenging the Gaps: Collaboration in the Digital Humanities" in The
American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age
Davidson, "How a Class becomes a Community"
Crowdsourcing-- Digital Humanities Projects
Weekly Create: tool or theory of your choice.
WEEK EIGHT: Mapping Technologies and Literary Studies with Kathryn
Shaughnessy, University Libraries
October 23:
What is the Spatial Turn?
Read “What is the Spacial Turn?” “The Spacial Turn in
Literature.”
Farman, "Mapping the Digital Empire"
Stone, "Information Visualization"
Weekly Create: google maps
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WEEK NINE: Open Access
October 30:
Fitzpatrick, "Sharing and Giving it Away"
Access, Audience, Hacking the Academy
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (Preface, Intro, and/or Piracy)
View one of Lessig’s Ted Talks: Re-examing the Mix or Laws that Choke Creativity
Weekly Create:
WEEK TEN: Copyright, Intellectual Property, Privacy and Plagiarism
November 6:
View "A Fairy Use Tale"
Eisner and Vicinus, Introduction to Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism:
Teaching Writing in the Age of the Internet
Audrey Watters, "Student Data, Privacy, Ideology, Identity," From Hacking
Education
Wharton, "Digital Humanities, Copyright, and the Literary" in DHQ
Weekly Create:
WEEK ELEVEN: CommentPress Collaborations
November 13: writing collaboratively
WEEK TWELVE: The Future of Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age
November 20:
Digital Humanities Pedagogy (choose one chapter to read and blog about).
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A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age
“Pillars of Institutional Pedagogy: Ten Principles for the Future of Learning” in The
Future of Learning in the Digital Age (Davidson and Goldberg)
Weekly Create :
WEEK THIRTEEN: December 4
Final Class
Selected Bibliography:
Berry, David M. “The Computational Turn: Thinking About the Digital
Humanities.”
Culture Machine 12 (2011): 1–22. http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440.
Davidson, Cathy N. “Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions.”
PMLA 123, no. 3
(2008): 707–17.http://www.mlajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1632/pmla.2008.123.3.707.
-------Now You See It . New York: Viking, 2011.
Draxler, Bridget, et al. “Democratizing Knowledge.”
HASTAC. September 21,
2009. http://hastac.org/forums/hastac-scholars-discussions/democratizing-knowledgedigital-humanities.
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy . New York: NYU Press,
2009.http://www.lib.umich.edu/events/kathleen-fitzpatrick-planned-obsolescencepublishing-technology-and-future-academy.
———. “Reporting from the Digital Humanities 2010 Conference.”
ProfHacker.
July
13, 2010.http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/reporting-from-the-digital-humanities-
2010-conference/25473.
Flanders, Julia, Wendell Piez, and Melissa Terras. “Welcome to Digital Humanities
Quarterly.”
Digital Humanities Quarterly 1, no. 1
(2007).http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/1/1/000007/000007.html.
Flanders, Julia. “The Productive Unease of 21st-century Digital Scholarship.” Digital
Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 3
(2009).http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000055/000055.html.
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4Humanities: Advocating for the Humanities. 4Humanities Collective. Initiated
November 2010. http://humanistica.ualberta.ca/.
Gold. Matthew. Ed. Debates in the Digital Humanities . University of Minnesota Press,
2012. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/book
Hayles, N. Katherine, “How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine”
ADE Bulletin 150
(2010): 62–79.
_______ How We Think . University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, Joshua Green. Eds. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and
Meaning in a Networked Culture (Postmillennial Pop). New York University Press,
2013.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination .
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008.
Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and
Technology.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Liu, Alan. “Close, Distant, and Unexpected Reading: New Forms of Literary Reading in the Digital Age.” Lecture. HUMlab, Umeå University, Sweden. May 10,
2011. http://blog.humlab.umu.se/?p=3366.
———.
The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information . Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004.
———. Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database .
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
———. “The State of the Digital Humanities: A Report and a Critique.”
Arts and
Humanities in Higher Education 11, no. 1 (2012): 1–34 (forthcoming).
———. “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” Lecture presented in truncated form. The History and Future of the Digital Humanities panel. MLA Annual
Convention. Los Angeles, January 7, 2011. Full version subsequently posted on Alan Liu personal blog.http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/where-is-cultural-criticism-in-the-digitalhumanities.
Lukács, Georg.
The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the
Forms of Great Epic Literature . Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1971.
McCarty, Willard. “In Denial?”
Humanist listserv 24.905. April 25,
2011.http://lists.digitalhumanities.org/pipermail/humanist/2011-April/002122.html.
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———. “Industrialization of the Digital Humanities?”
Humanist listserv 24.422.
October 21, 2010.http://lists.digitalhumanities.org/pipermail/humanist/2010-
October/001644.html.
McGann, Jerome J . Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web. New
York: Palgrave, 2001.
Michel, Jean-Baptiste, Erez Lieberman Aiden et al. “Quantitative Analysis of Culture
Using Millions of Digitized Books.”
Science 331 , no. 6014 (January 14, 2011): 176–
82,http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/176.
Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History . London;
New York: Verso, 2005.
OMEKA. Home page. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George
Mason University. http://omeka.org/.
Orwant, Jon. “Our Commitment to the Digital Humanities.” Official Google Blog. July
14, 2010.http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/our-commitment-to-digitalhumanities.html.
Pannapacker, William. “The MLA and the Digital Humanities.” Brainstorm blog, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 28,
2009.http://chronicle.com/blogPost/The-MLAthe-Digital/19468/.
Prescott, Andrew. “Digital Humanities and the Cuts.”
Humanist listserv 24.427. October
24, 2010.http://lists.digitalhumanities.org/pipermail/humanist/2010-
October/001649.html.
Ramsay, Stephen. “On Building.” Stephen Ramsay blog. January 11,
2011. http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/11/on-building.html.
———. “Who’s In and Who’s Out.” Lecture. The History and Future of the Digital
Humanities panel. MLA Annual Convention. Los Angeles, January 7, 2011. Stephen
Ramsay personal website, January 8, 2011.http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/08/whosin-and-whos-out.html.
Reid, Alex. “Alan Liu, Cultural Criticism, the Digital Humanities, and Problem
Solving?”
Digital Digs (blog). January 17, 2011.http://www.alex-reid.net/2011/01/alanliu-cultural-criticism-and-the-digital-humanities.html.
Renear, Allen, et al. “Refining Our Notion of What Text Really Is: The Problem of
Overlapping Hierarchies.” January 6, 1993. Scholarly Technology Group, Brown
University Library.http://www.stg.brown.edu/resources/stg/monographs/ohco.html.
Schreibman, Susan. “Computer-mediated Texts and Textuality: Theory and
Practice.”
Computers and the Humanities 36, no. 3 (2002): 283–
93. http://www.jstor.org/pss/30200528.
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Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution . New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1959.
Tanner, Simon. “Inspiring Research, Inspiring Scholarship: The Value and Benefits of
Digitized Resources for Learning, Teaching, Research and Enjoyment.” November 2010.
JISC (Joint Information Systems
Committee).http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitisation/12pagefinal documentbenefitssynthesis.pdf.
White House (President Obama). “A Strategy for American Innovation: Driving Towards
Sustainable Growth and Quality Jobs.” September
2009.http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/nec/StrategyforAmericanInnovation
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