Other Teaching Resource

Anastasia Salter's publication in the journal Syllabus includes a preferatory essay and syllabus for her course in practice-based course interactive narrative.

From the preface to her essay:

Students in game design programs, such as the Simulation and Digital Entertainment program at the University of Baltimore, often aspire to become makers of digital works. In the service of those needs, the University of Baltimore’s game design program integrates courses on design, programming, and technical art. Courses that make games an object of study are essential to providing these students context and in introduction to the potential of the medium, but they are often viewed as secondary by students focused on immediately applicable skills towards employment in the industry. My approach to resolving this apparent disconnect was to propose a new course in Interactive Narrative grounded in the process of “critical making,” which Daniel Chamberlain defines as “making a way to better ask questions” (Chamberlain 2013). The guiding questions of both the course and the projects revolve around stories: What are the opportunities of interactive narratives, and how does storytelling in a space with player agency offer new potential for experience design? The content of the course encourages students to contextualize games among media more broadly with exposure to forms including interactive fiction, electronic literature, comics and hypertext, while the practice of the course requires the making of works in these genres alongside study. I taught the course in fall 2013 for the first time following its acceptance as part of the curriculum.

This is a wiki version of New Media Art, a book written by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana and published by Taschen in 2006. The Taschen book is available in French, German, Italian, Korean, and Spanish in addition to English.

(Source: Author's Blurb)

Digital media and computational technologies are revolutionizing our lives by altering relations between our selves, others, and the world. Literacy studies, this course proposes, can help us better understand the digital revolution’s impact by situating its innovative technologies, those “new media” that rapidly lose their aura of newness, within a longer discursive history.

Students will study literary mediations of technological developments from the late-19th century to the present. The emphasis will be on analyzing how modern writers, active in 20th- and 21st-century literary discourse networks, have engaged with technology and responded to the technologization of culture. In an historical survey spanning several literary movements and stages of modernity, we’ll explore how literature, literary theory, and criticism have transcribed the technological imaginary and reconfigured people’s everyday lives and experiences.

Students will be introduced to several literary resources in the digital humanities. Interested students may have opportunities to collaborate in digital-humanities projects affiliated with a literary database (the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, http://elmcip.net) or one of the Web’s longest-running, open-access, literary-critical journals (ebr, the Electronic Book Review http://www.electronicbookreview.com).

This course was offered in the Spring 2014 semester to MA students enrolled in the Literacy Studies program at the University of Stavanger.

Visual Poetics of Literary Form: from Visual Poetry to Poetry Film examines the development of experimental literary forms from visual to multimedia poetics through the twenties century in radically changing landscape of Russian cultural history. Explores their transition across national and media borders. Course will look at the history of representation of visual poetic forms from Russian futurism and avante-garde further on to the underground samizdat, poetry film, kinetic and digital poetry pratices. Careful observation of the dynamics of the visual poetic forms will allow to re-think the notion of novelity, as well as to observe how the economical and historic circumstances can influence the mode and media used by the artist. Students will be required to do reading for each class and also will be encouraged to submit visual poetic works of their own for the final exhibition with the discussion to follow.

The UCSB English Department encourages upper-division students with particular literary/critical interests to pursue them formally by selecting one of the new specializations in the major. The specialization in Literature and the Culture of Information (supervised by the department's Transcriptions Project) brings the perspective of the humanities to the concept of "information" that many students will engage with professionally and personally all their lives. In particular, Literature and the Culture of Information compares the forms, media, institutions, and aesthetics of the "information revolution" to similar revolutions in the past—e.g., the print revolution. The goal is to ask what the "well-read" have to offer the "well-informed," and vice versa. What was beautiful, enlightening, or cruel in the project of orality or literacy and their literatures? How does the project of information compare? And how might the insights of past ages of language be used to improve our contemporary age? Courses offered by the specialization in Literature and the Culture of Information hybridize the theory, practice, and literature of contemporary information culture with studies of the earlier information media of oral discourse, manuscripts, and print and the literature they embodied.

(Source: LCI Specialization at UBSB English Department's webpage)

For several centuries the novel has been associated with a single material form: the bound book, made of paper and printed with ink. But what happens when storytelling diverges from the book? What happens when writers weave stories that extend beyond the printed word? What happens when fiction appears in digital form, generated from a reader’s actions or embedded in a videogame? What happens when a novel has no novelist behind it, but a crowd of authors---or no human at all, just an algorithm?

We will address these questions and many more in this English Honors Seminar dedicated to post-print fiction. We will begin with two “traditional” novels that nonetheless ponder the meaning of narrative, books, and technology, and move quickly into several novels that, depending upon one’s point of view, either represent that last dying gasp of the printed book or herald a renaissance of the form. Alongside these four novels we will explore electronic literature, kinetic poetry, transmedia narratives, and videogames that both challenge and enrich our understanding of storytelling in the 21st century.

Guiding Concerns:

* the materiality of books

* the role, function, and question of authorship

* the narrative and aesthetic potential of procedure and chance

* the impact of technology upon the material and narrative form of fiction.

(Source: Course Guidelines)