English 197: Digitalizing Culture
Professor William Warner
Class: 2635 South Hall: TR 12:00-1:15PM
2507 South Hall; warner@humanitas.ucsb.edu
Office hours: Thursday 3:00-4:00, and by
appointment.
In the years immediately following World War II,
scientific work in areas like ballistics, encryption, and computing culminated
in the development of the modern digital computer and new disciplines called
cybernetics or information technology.
At the center of this work was the use of digital code—sequences of 0’s
and 1’s—to accomplish tasks of communication and computation at speeds
unattainable by ordinary means. Slowly, these developments in computer science
and information theory have penetrated many regions of social life.
Digitalizing has not just introduced the computer into our everyday lives or
“jacked” us into the Internet. It has also produced new cultural myths, new
technologies of the body, and new forms of entertainment. This course will try
to understand these developments by studying three kinds of writing in relation
to one another.
1)
A few (user friendly) classic texts from the early
theory of digital communication: by Alan Turing, Norbert Weiner, Vannevar Bush,
and others. These texts help to give an historical grounding to our
understanding of digitalization.
2)
What are the underlying forms of digital culture
and their implications for the way we live? Theories of new digital media offer
cogent critical analysis of some of the new forms of digital media: the digital
visual, the network, the database, and virtual reality. Digitalization poses
urgent social issues: for example, the plasticity, variety, and pervasiveness
of the new digital media have intensified long-standing worries that “media
determines culture,” but they have also liberated us to reinterpret the human
as an information system (a cyborg).
3)
Since the earliest days of digitalization, the work
of computer scientists and science fiction writers have been incited by the
idea that a computer can be understood as a brain, the brain as a computer. Is
this a fruitful scientific hypothesis or a fraught rivalry? Does it herald the
end of humanism or a life-enhancing alliance? What happens when computers get
small and begin to change the way we see, hear, and touch? when molecular
biology allows us to reinterpret organisms as machines? We will seek a nuanced
and critical understanding of this exchange between the human body and the
computer in texts and films like, I, Robot (Asimov) 2001/ A Space
Odyssey (Clarke/Kubrick); A Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway), Neuromancer
(Gibson), Snow Crash (Stephenson), and The Matrix.
Week 1: Introducing the Digital
4/3: Introduction
4/5: Katherine Hayles, “The Condition of
Virtuality” [R]; Seminar assignments
Week 2: Computer Intelligence and Human
Intelligence
4/10: Alan Turing, “Computing Machines and
Intelligence” (1950) [R]
Wed. 4/11: Workshop I: 5:00-6:00PM
4/12: Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
Week 3: Cybernetics and the Robot
4/17: Norbert Weiner essays [R]
4/19: Workshop II (developing team Websites)
Week 4: Virtual Reality: Seminar led by Michael
Heim
4/24:
(no class at 12:00; special class at 4:00-6:30PM): Michael Heim, "From
Interface to Cyberspace," [R], and “VR 101” [R]
Screening Wednesday, April 25,
5-7PM: 2536 South Hall: Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey
4/26: Discussion,
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; Philip K. Dick, “Preface,”
[R] and Henry Jenkins [W])
Week 5:
5/1: Arthur C. Clark, 2001: A Space Odyssey
5/3: Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” [R]
Week 6:
5/8: William Gibson, Neuromancer
5/10: Neuromancer and
Week 7:
5/15: Lev Manovich. “What is Digital Cinema?” [R]
5/17: Preview and update on web-teams
Week 8: the Network
5/22: Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash
5/24: Snow Crash
Week 9: The Database
5/29: Lev Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form” [R]
Screening: Wednesday, April 30,
5-7PM: South Hall 2536: Larry and Andy Wachowski, The Matrix
5/31: Andy and Larry Wachowski, The Matrix
; Sean Fanning and the invention of Napster
Week 10: Seminar Web Project presentations
6/5: Web projects
6/7: Web projects
Required texts: (my purchased at
the UCEN or in Isle Vista)
Readers may be purchased
at the Alternative Copy Shop; 6556 Pardall Road; Isla Vista (968-1055).
Requirements:
1)
Brief Seminar Presentation:
Each member of the seminar will be asked to offer a short (2-3 typed page)
introduction to some aspect of the seminar’s text. Here you should develop a
specific topic in relation to the text we are discussing. Please make copies
for each member of the seminar.
2)
Web site: Due June 7,
2001. 2 or 3 seminar members can collaborate on a web site relevant to the
subject of the course. Your team may stay quite close to the issues and topics
of the seminar, or range quite far into a topic relevant to “digitalizing
culture.” Web novices should not worry; there will be plenty of tech support
and graduate student support to help you do your web pages.
3)
Final seminar paper (7-9
pages long), upon a specific topic within your broader web page topic, should
be published on your web site and presented to me in hard copy form.
Ground rules:
A well functioning class is a collaborative
endeavor. For this reason I ask you to respect these ground rules:
1)
Attendance is required.
Please arrive on time for a full 75-minute class.
2)
Reading assignments are an indispensable part of
seminar work; the care and quality of your reading will determine the quality
of both our discussions and your independent web project and paper.
3)
Format: Please print your class presentation and
your final paper on 8 ½ X 11” paper, with 1” margins in (12 point) font. Papers
should have a works cited list.
4)
Breakdown of grade: class attendance and participation:
25% class presentation 15%; final web site 25%; and final paper 35%.
5)
In order to help you with your web projects and
paper, I will schedule talks with each of you during and outside of my office
hours. However, feel free to come by my office hours (Thursday 3-4PM), or email
me to make an appointment to talk…about the content of the course, a special
problem, or just to talk.
Useful links:
The UCSB English Department website: www.english.ucsb.edu
The Transcriptions Project website: http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/
Our course web site:
http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/courses/warner/english197/