Syllabus for a university or high school course.
Alan Sondheim's outline / syllabus / notes for courses he taught on the Internet, covering applications, social aspects, and digital textuality, at various institutions in 1995-96.
A introductory level BA course taught in the Digital Culture program at the University of Bergen. For each genre section, the course provides three-week introductions to genres of cultural artifacts particular to the network and the computer, specifically computer and network art, electronic literature, and computer games. Students in the course will learn to analyze contemporary digital artifacts on a textual and structural basis, within the general framework of genre studies.
This course introduces students to the study of digital media. Moving from video games to alternative art installations, from cyberpunk fiction and films to social media sites, it focuses on the theory, history, politics and aesthetics of digital media. Special attention will be paid to the tensions between our perceptions of technology and its actual operations and to technology’s intersections with social/cultural formations (gender, sexuality, race, global flows) and with issues of control and freedom.
Students use innovative compositional techniques to write extraordinary texts, focusing on new writing methods rather than on traditional lyrical or narrative concerns. Writing experiments, conducted individually, collaboratively and during class meetings, culminate in chapbook-sized projects. Students read, listen to, and create different types of work, including sound poetry, cut-ups, constrained and Oulipian writing, uncreative writing, sticker literature, false translations, artists' books, and digital projects.
Digital Humanities in Practice: Project Work on Developing a Scholarly Database of Electronic Literature
Students work with scholars on a current international research project "Electronic Literature as a Model for Creativity in Practice" (ELMCIP) in particular working on the development and editing of the 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 read scholarship on digital humanities as a field and explore and read articles related to the digital humanities.
In individual projects, students develop expertise in a particular field of research in e-lit. In that respect, the course offers students ways to create interpretative frameworks for a specific set of data and trains students in adapting "digital methods" critically.
To be agreed upon with individual students skillsets and interests, practices in the course include:
After completing the course, students will have assessed the usefulness of a range of digital humanities strategies in specific scholarly work, have experience in discussing organizational and design choices in developing a scholarly database, and have investigated in the community of electronic literature.
Note: The complete reading list appears in the attached syllabus.
This course enabled an online cooperation between teachers and students within a cooperative transatlantical teaching framework, it is based on a collaboration between the University of Siegen, Germany and Brown University, USA. Five student groups were assigned one topic and one work (plus relevant examples), as well as leading questions to discuss and close read the assigned work. Topics included: installations, textual instruments/instrumental texts, digital photography, and mapping art. Over the semester students discussed their assigned work via an online forum, while participating in face-to-face classes at their universities. For a final session both students and teachers met online for a video conference.
An exploration of the material poetics and certain (transcultural) practices of writing, beginning 'West' and moving 'East,' wherever 'to write' always means something radically different 'here' and 'now' or 'there' and 'then.' We will engage with, amongst others, work by: Steve McCaffery, Joan Retallack, Caroline Bergvall, TNWK (material poetics & performance); John Welch & Ian Sinclair (out walking); John Hall (domestic grammars); Oskar Pastior & Harry Mathews (self-referential machinery); Alan Sondheim (bad code read/writing in Life 2.x); Alec Finlay (shared writing in the open air); Wang Wei (regulated verse/painting); Wang Xizhi (prefaces, parties, & calligraphic afterparties); Xu Bing (hallucinations of world writing); with theorist/critics: Foucault; Fenollosa; Kittler; Derrida; Lessig.
Explore the material poetics of writing, 'West' and 'East.' Even within our own - Eurocentric - culture, writing is embodied and practiced in many different ways. There are familiar, predominant, and authoritative forms of writing and publication, both expository and creative. There are popular, marginal, avant-garde, and newly mediated practices which may be social, political, literary, and so on, and which may fashion language into forms and performances that exceed both convention and critical expectation. How can language, embodied in unfamiliar forms, become significant, affective, or perhaps even powerfully effective? We will try to answer this and related questions through readings and discussions of criticism, theory, and literary work. We will examine the poetics of what I am calling writing's material differences: what language is as substance and system. We will also, importantly, seek a transcultural perspective on embodied creative writing, since I will introduce practices - including both poetics and calligraphy as a writing practice - in the Chinese culture-sphere, the only other 'place' on the planet where writing in a radically different way supports a fully-formed and distinct civilisation.
(Source: Lesson Plan)
University of Bergen course in Electronic Literature, taught in Fall 2012 by Fulbright lecturer Leonardo Flores.
Electronic literature is literary fiction and poetry created for the computer and the network. Genres of electronic literature, while focused on poetics, have connections to other forms of digital culture such as network art and computer games. In this course, students will read works of electronic literature as for instance hypertext fiction, digital poetry, and interactive fiction. Students will also study theoretical and critical studies of electronic literature.
Creative practice is an important component of the course, and all students will participate in the production of collaborative work of electronic literature, either created from scratch as a website or similar, or modifying an existing work of electronic literature. The necessary technical skills will be taught as needed. Students will also receive practical training in analyzing electronic literature, in particular in analysis of how the elements common in electronic literature, such as images, motion, time and space and interactivity influence the text of experience and reader experience, and how this also complicates our understanding of traditional narrative and poetry.
Digital Humanities in Practice: Project Work on Developing a Scholarly Database of Electronic Literature
Students work with scholars on a current international research project "Electronic Literature as a Model for Creativity in Practice" (ELMCIP) in particular working on the development and editing of the 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 read scholarship on digital humanities as a field and explore and read articles related to the digital humanities.
In individual projects, students develop expertise in a particular field of research in e-lit. In that respect, the course offers students ways to create interpretative frameworks for a specific set of data and trains students in adapting "digital methods" critically. To be agreed upon with individual students skillsets and interests, practices in the course include:
After completing the course, students will have assessed the usefulness of a range of digital humanities strategies in specific scholarly work, have experience in discussing organizational and design choices in developing a scholarly database, and have investigated in the community of electronic literature.
Note: The complete reading list appears in the attached syllabus.