Literature & Culture of Information Specialization

The following undergraduate courses are created and staffed for the LCI by the Transcriptions Project (which also teaches graduate seminars on information culture). Course web sites are normally created shortly before each course is offered.

2008-2009

Fall

English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study--Serial Media (instructor: Charlotte Becker).
      This course will explore practices of serialization beginning with the innovative phenomenon of 19th-century serial fiction, and will extend to analyses of the ways that various media—including radio, television, and the internet—have subsequently adopted and adapted serial formats. Discussion and reading topics will include the authorial practices, copyright issues, economic concerns, and social/cultural responses related to serial media. Through these discussions we will develop a vocabulary to discuss narrative techniques that make a serial format effective, and to describe the unique features of each series with which we engage. Major coursework will include a piece of online serial fiction (written in collaboration with classmates) and a critical essay on a serial publication.
      Required Texts:
      Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
      Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
      Henry James, Henry James: Selected Stories
      Course reader from ASUCSB (available in September)
English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study (instructor: Mike Frangos).
[Description TBA]
English 147VP: Media History and Theory (instructor: Carol Pasternak).
Printed editions of medieval texts give only the barest suggestions of what these texts might have meant to their contemporaries because they experienced them either in oral performance, possibly with music and even movement, or in manuscript, sometimes highly decorated and with commentary in the margins or between the lines, always unique. In this class, we will examine medieval texts with the goal of figuring out how they were meaningful at the time of their production and/or performances. In addition to edited texts, we will look at manuscript facsimiles (digital and print) and a few actual medieval manuscripts in order to see the traces of oral composition and performance and see how the texts were written and read. And we will consider the impacts of distinctive information technologies on ‘literature’ and ‘information.’ Among the literary texts we will study are Beowulf, psalms, Middle English lyrics, Sir Orfeo, and parts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Webpage authoring will be part of the work.

Winter

English 122NW: Narratives of War (instructor: Rita Raley).
This course examines twentieth-century narratives of war from the perspective of our contemporary moment. It thus does not aim to be historically comprehensive; instead our reading will be focused on certain questions and themes, including smart war; total war; just war; military intervention; models of the enemy; trauma; and the reformulation of human rights in the context of the "war on terror." Print narratives will include Pat Barker, Regeneration (and short selections of WWI poetry by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen); Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992-1995; Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried; Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose; and others. Theory and criticism will include Ernst Friedrich, Jordan Crandall, Paul Virilio, James Der Derian, Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, and Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. Films will include Apocalypse Now and West Beirut. Games and other media projects will include September 12; Antiwargame; America's Army; Full Spectrum Warrior; and Baghdad <> San Francisco. (Media projects such as The Great Game will illuminate the shift from representation to information visualization.) We will also consider the rhetoric and function of war reporting and discuss excerpts from films such as The Mills of the Gods, War Feels Like War, Gunner Palace and Jarhead.
There will be two papers and a comprehensive final exam. This course will count toward the undergraduate specialization in Literature & Culture of Information but is designed for a general audience; LCI students will compose a web project to substitute for one of the papers. All students should be prepared to attend separate film screenings or to make alternate arrangements to see the films we will discuss in the course (DVDs and videos will be on reserve in Kerr Hall).
English 147A: Media History and Theory: Theorizing Adaptation--Translation and Mutation (instructor: Bishnupriya Ghosh).
      This course examines adaptation as a mode of translation geared to increase the life span of a text: adaptation is both reinterpretation (recoding, exchange, invention) and evolution (appropriation, updating, excision). Taking film to be our major media practice, we will look at several texts (fiction, non-fiction, feature films, plays) that are “adapted,” in order to consider a series of questions pertinent to adaptation theory: what is translated into film? What kinds of semiotic codes are at work in such translation? What is the common term of exchange? What kinds of value are produced in these acts? What context governs these acts of production? How are they received? These queries are ultimately aimed at a larger inquiry: can there be such a thing as “adaptation theory”? And if so, what are its disciplinary constraints? Students will be expected to watch five or six films outside of class time (time equivalent to the one-two hours you would spend preparing for a class), participate in class discussions, and write a research paper on a topic of their choice.
      This course will include one and a half weeks on digital translations of television or graphic novels, and will give students the option of doing projects on new media.
      Required Texts:
      Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)
      James Naremore ed., Film Adaptation (2000)
      Course Reader (Pick up at Associated Students)
English 149: Media and Information Culture--Literary Imagination and Virtual Reality (co-instructors: James Donelan and Alan Liu) (5-unit course with seminar meetings and a lab).
Because of the recent, shared emphasis in many fields on digital methods, scholars in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences increasingly need to collaborate across disciplines. This course reflects theoretically and practically on the concept of literary study by asking students to choose a literary work and treat it according to one or more of the research paradigms prevalent in other fields. Students, for example, could choose a story or poem to model, simulate, map, visualize, encode, text-analyze, sample, storyboard, blog, or redesign as a game, database, hypertext, or virtual world. What are the strengths and weaknesses of literary interpretation, close reading, or theory by comparison with other research methods?

Spring

English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study-- (instructor: TBA).
[Description TBA]
English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study-- (instructor: TBA).
[Description TBA]
English 197: Upper-Division Seminar--Poetry Lab (instructor: Yunte Huang).
[Description TBA]

2007-2008

Fall

English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study-- (instructor: Gerald Egan).
[Description TBA]
English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study-- (instructor: Bret Brinkman).
[Description TBA]
English 147A: Theorizing Adaptation--Translation and Mutation (instructor: Bishnupriya Ghosh)
     This course examines adaptation as a mode of translation geared to increase the life span of a text: adaptation is both reinterpretation (recoding, exchange, invention) and evolution (appropriation, updating, excision). Taking film to be our major media practice, we will look at several texts (fiction, non-fiction, feature films, plays) that are “adapted,” in order to consider a series of questions pertinent to adaptation theory: what is translated into film? What kinds of semiotic codes are at work in such translation? What is the common term of exchange? What kinds of value are produced in these acts? What context governs these acts of production? How are they received? These queries are ultimately aimed at a larger inquiry: can there be such a thing as “adaptation theory”? And if so, what are its disciplinary constraints? Students will be expected to watch five or six films outside of class time (time equivalent to the one-two hours you would spend preparing for a class), participate in class discussions, and write a research paper on a topic of their choice.
      (This course can be taken for the Literature and Culture of Information specialization. The course will include one and a half weeks on digital translations of television or graphic novels, and will give students the option of doing projects on new media.)
      Required Texts:
      Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)
      James Naremore ed., Film Adaptation (2000)
      Course Reader (Pick up at Associated Students)
English 197: Senior Seminar, The Material Lyric (instructor: Carol Pasternack).
A study of short poems from Anglo-Saxon England to the 21st century for their materiality of performance and publication as well as their ability to speak across time and beyond their original material forms and textual conventions. Texts will include lyrics from the Old English Exeter Book ("Wanderer," "Seafarer," "Wife's Lament," riddles); Harley lyrics; sonnets; Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience; hypertext lyrics.
English 197: Senior Seminar, Dystopian Fictions (instructor: Rita Raley).
       This course cannot be repeated and is limited to upper-division English majors only. The ubiquity of dystopian themes in contemporary culture is perhaps entirely to be expected. As we will see, imagining post-apocalyptic or otherwise catastrophic futures can be read as one means of cultural critique. We shall thus examine these dystopic visions of a spectacular future as a critical engagement with the present. In our reading and film viewing we will encounter varied agents, institutions, and systems of social change, among them biotechnology (viruses, genetic engineering, cloning); media technologies; late capitalism; the intensification of state power; the "war on terror"; and ecological disaster.
      Texts:
      Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
      Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
      Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
      Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
      Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower
      Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
Essays by Mike Davis, Lieven De Cauter, and others. Graphic fiction will include Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan and Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman, Shooting War. Films will include Videodrome, Brazil, and Children of Men.

Winter

English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study--Modern Interpretations of the Medieval (instructor: Lydia Balian).
This course will provide students with an introduction to literary analysis by examining interpretations of the medieval after the medieval period by means of a comparison of medieval texts with interpretations of the medieval via text, film, and digital media, such as video games. Our critical examination of these various forms of media will be directed by a few overriding questions: Has medieval literature been idealized since the medieval period? Has it been caricatured? How is medieval literature relevant to us today? In terms of media and technology, additional questions arise, such as: How does literature and technology intersect? How do they diverge? Do different media forms affect our perception of the content?
English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study--Modernism 2.0 (instructor: Mike Frangos).
This course will provide an introduction to techniques in reading and analyzing literary texts from a variety of genres by means of an overview of key sources in modern and contemporary literature beginning with the revolution in literary form initiated in the early 20th century. Attending to “culture” as itself another “text” to be read alongside literature, we will consider developments unique to the scene of the modern such as the “New Woman” and feminism, fashion and self-fashioning, race and sexuality. As we develop skills in traditional approaches to the interpretation of poetry and fiction, we will remain self-conscious about how our own approaches to literature have changed as new media technologies have dramatically altered how we read and view texts. In addition to sharpening skills in critical analysis through traditional academic papers, students will use “Web 2.0” applications including blogs, wikis, social networking, video and photo sharing, mashups and machinima, to document the class’s own evolving relationship with the literary text. This course functions within the English department’s “Literature and the Culture of Information” specialization.
English 149: Media and Information Culture -- Literary Imagination and Virtual Reality (instructor: Alan Liu) (5-unit course with seminar meetings and a lab).
This course reexamines the nature and function of literature by comparing it to new kinds of imaginative experience available though today's digital media. How does literary experience work in an imaginative work of fiction or a poem? How does such imaginative experience compare to the way a computer simulation, game, or virtual reality environment affects the user? Students will be create, and write about, projects that reflect on the relation between literature and virtual reality on the basis of concrete cases (e.g., by replotting a novel as a computer game or blog, role-playing literary interpretation using the Ivanhoe Game, playing an "interactive fiction," building a simulation of a literary universe in the NetLogo program, building an interactive animation of a poem using the Scratch program, staging or performing a literary work in the Second Life virtual world, etc.). The lab component of the course teaches technological skills and allows students to collaborate on projects.

Spring

English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study-- (instructor: Paxton Hehmeyer).
This course provides an introduction to literary interpretation with particular attention to the intersections of technology and literature. In pursuing our focus on technology, we will closely examine the relationship between different media and how those media define or influence the content of a work. In doing so we will ask questions fundamental to the study of literature: What is a text? What is literature's relationship to the world? Who is an author and what does it mean to write? Who is a reader and what does it mean to read? How have these concepts been defined historically?
English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study-- (instructor: David Roh).
[Description TBA]
English 122 NW: Narratives of War (instructor: Rita Raley) (lecture course).
This course examines twentieth-century narratives of war from the perspective of our contemporary moment. It thus does not aim to be historically comprehensive; instead our reading will be focused on certain questions and themes, including smart war; total war; just war; military intervention; models of the enemy; trauma; and the reformulation of human rights in the context of the "war on terror." Print narratives will include Pat Barker, Regeneration (and short selections of WWI poetry by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen); Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992-1995; Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried; Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose; and others. Theory and criticism will include Ernst Friedrich, Jordan Crandall, Paul Virilio, James Der Derian, Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, and Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. Films will include Apocalypse Now and West Beirut. Games and other media projects will include September 12; Antiwargame; America's Army; Full Spectrum Warrior; and Baghdad <> San Francisco. (Media projects such as The Great Game will illuminate the shift from representation to information visualization.) We will also consider the rhetoric and function of war reporting and discuss excerpts from films such as The Mills of the Gods, War Feels Like War, Gunner Palace and Jarhead.
There will be two papers and a comprehensive final exam. This course will count toward the undergraduate specialization in Literature & Culture of Information but is designed for a general audience; LCI students will compose a web project to substitute for one of the papers. All students should be prepared to attend separate film screenings or to make alternate arrangements to see the films we will discuss in the course (DVDs and videos will be on reserve in Kerr Hall).
English 146: Literature of Technology: Electronic Literature (instructor: Rita Raley).
English 147SS: Media History and Theory: From Scroll to Screen (instructor: Carol Pasternack).
This course will explore the differences in telling a tale orally, in writing, in print, and on the computer screen. We will begin with oral composition and performance, working with Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller, which represents the interactions between oral tradition and print, and Euro and Native American ethnicities. We then hurl ourselves back in time to the 6th century BCE, the era in which the Jews made the transition from being a people of a geographical location and oral culture to being a people in exile and a people of the book. We will look both at the special nature of a holy book and the physical aspects and implications of its material shape as scroll and have the chance to see the Torah up close with Rabbi Steve Cohen. Next we will zero in on medieval manuscript culture, looking at the materials themselves (vellum and pigments) and the uses of the page with gorgeous decorations, glosses and text, courtesy of special presentations by curators at the Getty. We'll approach this medium first through Psalms and Books of Hours and then through Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies. Christine is remarkable in being one of the first writers to have a sense of herself as an "author," as well as being a force in the production of texts that support rather than denigrate women. Then we move on to the era of print and specifically the more wide-spread circulation of texts in newspapers and pamphlets and turn to the American colonies and Benjamin Franklin, early printer, newspaper publisher, and promoter of public libraries. The class will conclude with hypertext and interactive fiction, looking at how this medium changes the roles of reader and author as it changes the nature of the text itself, and once again the complex contributions of economics to these changes. The class will include considerable use of the Web as a topic of analysis, a means of access to manuscripts and early print texts, and as a medium for producing the students' own work. Assignments will involve "doing" as well as analyzing.
English 149: Media History of the American Revolution (instructor: William Warner).
[Description TBA]
English 197: Senior Seminar, Dystopian Fictions (instructor: Rita Raley).

2006-2007

Fall

English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study--Literation: Lists in Literature (instructor: Jeremy Douglass).
How does the literary technique of listing resist (and demand) a story? Grounding our understanding of the list in ancient literary forms (commandments, litanies, miscellanies, commonplace books), we will focus on a survey of lists in contemporary fiction (in novels and antinovels, language poems, comic books, indexes, ephemera, and almanacs and biographies both fictional and real). Our eventual consideration will be lists as they occur in new media (hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, video games) and the aesthetics of databases, procedural logic, and computation.
English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study--Artists, Creation, Technology, and Structure (instructor: Maggie Sloan).
This course offers an introduction to literature with an emphasis in exploring the intersection between traditional forms of literature and newer technologies. We will read across three primary genres--poetry, drama, and prose--and work closely with the texts to develop critical reading and writing skills. We will pay particular attention to the importance of media and to the consideration of digital approaches to literature. Texts include: William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Jorge Luis Borge's "The Garden of Forking Paths."

English 147VP: The Voice and the Page (instructor: Carol Pasternack).
What does it mean to tell a story? What does it mean to write a story? What does it mean to listen to the story or to read it? The meanings of stories have a direct relationship to their material realities and the parts they play in social situations. In this class, we will examine medieval texts with the goal of figuring out how they were meaningful at the time of their production and/or performances. We will look at edited texts and also at manuscript facsimiles (digital and print) and a few actual medieval manuscripts in order to see the traces of oral composition and performance and see how the texts were written and read. We will consider, “What do these early texts tell us about the varieties of performances and texts that we might call ‘literature’ and the varieties that we might call ‘information’?” And we will consider the impacts of distinctive information technologies on ‘literature’ and ‘information.’ Webpage authoring will be part of the work.

Winter

English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study--Artistry and Media (instructor: Kris McAbee).
This course addresses such issues as the role of the artist in reception and circulation, the cultural stakes of the artist figure, and notions of "oustider" or "fringe" artists. We will analyze texts from a wide range of media, genres, and historical periods, including but not limited to selections of early modern and Modernist poetry, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses, and selections from the UCSB Early Modern Center's Pepys Ballad Archive, among other "new media."
English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study--Quotidian Narratives (instructor: Jeff Beckstrand).
Narratives live in strange and often boring places. In addition to general introduction to literary form, genre and method, this course seeks to examine the lives of ledgers, footnotes, indices, chess, weather, playing cards, lunchtimes, bicycles, magic, buttons, cookies, air conditioners, &tc. This course will focus on narratives of "mundanity" during the technological culture of the A-bomb and Apollo era, with attendant attention to its origins and future. Featuring novels, poems, plays, films, art, theory and music by Barthes, Queneau, O'Hara, Newman, Pollock, Beckett, Johnson, Coover, Nabokov, Cage, Duchamp, and Welles.

English 122 NW: Narratives of War (instructor: Rita Raley) (lecture course).
This course examines twentieth-century narratives of war from the perspective of our contemporary moment. It thus does not aim to be historically comprehensive; instead our reading will be focused on certain questions and themes, including smart war; total war; just war; military intervention; models of the enemy; trauma; and the reformulation of human rights in the context of the “war on terror.” Print narratives will include Pat Barker, Regeneration (and short selections of WWI poetry by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen); Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992-1995; Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried; Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose; and others. Theory and criticism will include Ernst Friedrich, Jordan Crandall, Paul Virilio, James Der Derian, Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, and Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. Films will include Apocalypse Now and West Beirut. Games and other media projects will include September 12; Antiwargame; America's Army; Full Spectrum Warrior; and Baghdad <> San Francisco. (Media projects such as The Great Game will illuminate the shift from representation to information visualization.) We will also consider the rhetoric and function of war reporting and discuss excerpts from films such as The Mills of the Gods, War Feels Like War, Gunner Palace and Jarhead.
There will be two papers and a comprehensive final exam. This course will count toward the undergraduate specialization in Literature & Culture of Information but is designed for a general audience; LCI students will compose a web project to substitute for one of the papers. All students should be prepared to attend separate film screenings or to make alternate arrangements to see the films we will discuss in the course (DVDs and videos will be on reserve in Kerr Hall).

English 133 GC: Global California (instructor: Chris Newfield).
This course is an introduction to California literature and culture after 1940. It addresses questions such as: What was the "California Dream"? What is happening to the California Dream today? How has California culture and society changed since World War II? Is California a philosophy or just another state in the union? What does "globalization" mean and how is it changing California culture and society? Is California still a leading-edge place, the place where "the future happens first"? What will happen to 21st Century California? In order to answer these questions, we will consider some major California themes: crime, money, moguls, tech booms, immigration, fame, sex, silicon, alienation, racism, multiculturalism, movies, and self-actualization.

Spring

English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study--Global Mi-/Immi-gration (instructor: Yanoula Athanassakis).
This course is designed to provide students with an introduction to a variety of literary genres, including poetry, short stories, drama, and prose. In doing so we’ll pay particular attention to the way that writers describe immigration (particularly to the United States), cultural flows and exchanges, and hybrid/split identity formations via literary and visual representation. Staying primarily within the borders of the 20th and 21st centuries, we’ll explore how the global immigrant experience is both explicitly and implicitly represented in literature, popular culture, and new media. We’ll find and prod the different types of borders that are crossed when a work goes from print to video to film to hypertext, and how the inherent "crossings" within a text's words are challenged and/or reinforced by changes in medium. Our reading will include excerpts from works by Jhumpa Lahiri, Elizabeth Bishop, Jeffrey Eugenides, Edwidge Danticat, Jean Rhys, Paul Gilroy, and Judith Butler (to name a few). We’ll also be viewing films and working with the web.
English 10LC: Introduction to Literary Study--Body, Text, Technology (instructor: Robin Chin).
The primary goal of this course as an “English 10” is to introduce students to the basic skills of literary analysis through the examination a wide variety of prose and poetic forms. In addition, as an LCI affiliated course, students will be required to complete a wide variety of writing assignments that recognize and interact with the “culture of information,” from weekly online reading reflections to a final web page project of significant analytical depth. The secondary goal of this course is to engage students in a particular discussion about the relationship between two concepts -- the text and the body -- and how this fascinating relationship is influenced by recent revolutions in “modern” technology. Beginning with the Industrial Age and Victorian literature and continuing through the Information age and literary works of the late 20th century, this course will pay special attention to the rise of “new media” in literary studies. Readings may include: Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein; the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe; the short stories of Franz Kafka; the poetry of Charles Baudelaire; war poems from various World War I authors; the sci-fi film Forbidden Planet (1956); William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer; and N. Katherine Hayles’ Writing Machines. This course will include a reader. No previous web experience is required to enroll.

English 25: Introduction to Literature and the Culture of Information (instructor: Alan Liu) (lecture course).
This course studies contemporary information culture from the viewpoint of the humanities and arts. What is information, and why is it so important that it not only affects our economy, politics, and society but also our culture (the culture of "cool," it has been called) and our arts (the "new media" literatures, arts, music, and games). The course brings writings about information society together with works of new-media literature and art to study the following aspects of information: information as media, communication, and "new media"; information as work and power; and information as identity (see the Schedule page for details). Required readings are in print (e.g., Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, William Gibson's novel, Neuromancer), on the Web, and on CD-ROM (M. D. Coverley's hypertext novel, Califia). Assignments include some Web-authoring at the beginner's level. No pre-existing technical skills are needed, but the ability to access the Web is necessary to do the online readings.

English 146 CC: The Culture of the Copy (instructor: Rita Raley).
This course interprets “copy” in the broadest possible terms. Themes and issues we will consider include cloning, ALife, transgenics, cybernetics, simulation, masquerade, counterfeit, avatars, drag, la perruque, doppelgängers, déjà vu, the uncanny, viruses, phishing, virtual pets, recycled culture (plagiarism, appropriation), creative cloning, and copybots. Fiction will include Ishiguro, Churchill, and Palahniuk (texts below), Edgar Allan Poe, and others. Theory and criticism will include Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Baudrillard, and others. Art projects by Eduardo Kac, Tom Ray, The Yes Men, and others; discussion of The Sims and "I Want a Famous Face" and ideally one virtual class session in Second Life. Films will possibly include Blade Runner, The Boys from Brazil, Vertigo, or Dead Ringers.

English 194: Research Seminar in Literature and Culture of Information (instructor: Alan Liu).
This is an undergraduate research workshop or practicum (limited to 15 students) in which participants break into teams to pursue research related to literature and the culture of information. (The course may be counted for the English Dept's specialization in Literature and the Culture of Information.) The theme of this instance of the course is the relation between literary interpretation and other paradigms of knowledge, especially those that the new digital media and technologies are bringing into conjunction with the humanities. Students will create projects that experiment with literary interpretation by transforming it into such things as a "game," "simulation," "model," "experiment," "hypertext," "blog," "map," etc. (For example, students might build a computer simulation using the NetLogo program, play a "game" of literary interpretation like Jerome McGann's and Johanna Drucker's Ivanhoe Game, create a statistical representation or visualization of a text, create a GIS satellite-image-based map related to literature, create a blog in which the "contributors" are the characters in a novel, etc.). Student research will be published on a collective, online research Web site produced through a "wiki"publishing and editing environment that enacts the process of creative collaboration. Readings will include Franco Moretti's short book, Graphs, Maps,Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, parts of Willard McCarty's Humanities Computing, plus other print and online readings designed to stimulate though about the issues.
Prerequisites: a prior course in the English 146AA-ZZ, 147AA-Zz, or 148AA-ZZ series. (If you have taken other lower-division courses in the Literature and Culture of Information specialization, including English 10LCI and English 25, and would like to use those as your prerequisite, please consult the instructor. Students who have taken a previous instance of English 194 can take this new instance of the course as an independent study.)