Syllabus

The course is divided into three thematic modules. Each module consists of six lectures and one assignment. After each module students have a week to write a 1000 word draft paper. The following week the next module’s lectures begin, and students will receive feedback on their paper. They will choose two of their drafts to revise and expand to two 2000 word papers that they will hand in as your portfolio. Their grade for the course depends on the assessment of this final portfolio.

Module 1: Digital Self-Representations (Jill Walker Rettberg)
Module 2: Identity Online (Kathi Inman Berens, Fulbright Scholar visiting from Univ. of Southern California)
Module 3: Digital Media Ethics (Álvaro Seiça)

This course will provide an introduction to genres of cultural artifacts particular to the network and the computer, specifically computer and network art, electronic literature, and computer games. Traditional conceptions of genre and categories of cultural artifact, such as art object, performance, novel, poem, and game are undergoing redefinition in the context of digital culture, and new genres of cultural artifacts are emerging, which require new models of textual analysis specific to the computational media and network context in which these artifacts are produced and distributed. DIKULT103 provides an overview of these emerging genres, and an introduction to the models of academic discourse and analysis particular to them. Students in the course will learn to analyze contemporary digital artifacts on a textual and structural basis, within the general framework of genre studies.

Course introduction

The course focuses on the development of both theoretical and practical skills in digital humanities. Students will learn how digital platforms can be used in research in the humanities. In the theoretical component of the course, students read academic texts on digital humanities research and do practical research on selected projects in the digital humanities. The course focuses on student active research. Students gain practical research experience as digital humanists by developing projects in ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base. This knowledge base is a scientific, open access, relational database programmed in Drupal that documents creative work, research, events and actors in the field of electronic literature.

Students in the course will gain practical experience through working with one or more of the following areas:

• editing: researching, writing, and editing entries about electronic literature in the Knowledge Base
• web design and user interface development
• web design and user interface development
• project planning and implementation; team-work and academic collaboration
• documentation
• visualization based research methods

This course provides a unique opportunity for students to get real-world experience working with scholars on an international research project in electronic literature and the digital humanities, and to contribute to the state of the art in these fields.

The ELMCIP Knowledge Base is based at the University of Bergen and can be accessed at http://elmcip.net/knowledgebase

Contributions to the ELMCIP Knowledge Base are publicly accessible and licenced with a Creative Commons, non-commercial share-alike license (nc-sa).

Teaching Methods
There will be four hours of teaching each week for twelve weeks during the semester, split between one theoretical and one practical seminar each week.

Student workload is estimated at 20 hours per week from the beginning of the semester until the exam, including during weeks without classes. This time should be spent attending classes, reading the assigned readings, completing assignments, contributing to the database projects, and gathering relevant material in the library and online (books, articles, videos, etc).

If there are fewer than five students enrolled in the course, the institute can chose to reduce the hours of instruction, as per guidelines published on Mi Side. If this is the case, students will be able to find information about the revision of course hours at the start of the semester, before the deadline for semester registration (Feb. 1).

Class meetings are on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 14.15-16:00 in HF 265. Assignments will be posted on Mi Side.

UIB course page: http://www.uib.no/course/DIKULT207

This course will provide an introduction to genres of cultural artifacts particular to the network and the computer, specifically computer and network art, electronic literature, and computer games. Traditional conceptions of genre and categories of cultural artifact, such as art object, performance, novel, poem, and game are undergoing redefinition in the context of digital culture, and new genres of cultural artifacts are emerging, which require new models of textual analysis specific to the computational media and network context in which these artifacts are produced and distributed. DIKULT103 provides an overview of these emerging genres, and an introduction to the models of academic discourse and analysis particular to them. Students in the course will learn to analyze contemporary digital artifacts on a textual and structural basis, within the general framework of genre studies.

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.

Students work with scholars on the development and editing of the ELMCIP Knowledge Base for Electronic Literature. The Knowledge Base is a scholarly, relational database programmed in Drupal that documents works, events and actors in the field of electronic literature. In addition to participating in practical project-based work with an established team of senior and junior researchers, students will read scholarship on digital humanities as a field and will explore and read articles discussing selected digital humanities projects.

Students in the course gain practical experience through working with one or more of the following areas, to be agreed upon with the research team according to individual students¿ skillsets and interests:

• editing: researching, writing, and editing entries about electronic literature in the Knowledge Base.
• development: working on the Drupal backend to the Knowledge Base in collaboration with other project team members, either conceptually or taking part in the programming according to the student's prior skills
• web design and user interface development
• project planning and implementation; team work and collaboration in academia
• documentation