Syllabus

(From syllabus:) Digital literature exists at a unique crossroads between two very different media: games, and stories told with words. How can the needs of gameplay be balanced with the sometimes contradictory needs of storytelling? Is a creator of these works an author or a designer? Should interactive stories be beta tested or workshopped? How can one write prose meant to be manipulated by an audience?

This intensive hands-on course, half writing/design workshop and half survey of contem- porary work, will explore the many thriving micro-genres in the neutral zone between games and literature, including hypertext stories, parser-based interactive fiction, simulation- and system-based prose, and spatial and collaborative narratives. We will try out as many inter- active stories as we can, focusing on accessible work less than ten years old to emphasize the living and still-evolving state of digital literature. We’ll also learn several tools for making our own digital fictions, conducting a series of experiments culminating in a final project: a major piece of creative writing in a digital mode. The work we explore and create will help frame our discussions about what these evolving new media say about storytelling in the 21st century. 

In an increasingly digitised, networked, and visual culture, it has become clear that narrative is only one among many forms that is used to organise information and represent our world. The movement from print to digital media, however, has by no means left this cultural form behind. This course will introduce and analyse a range of narrative fiction that has emerged with the ascendancy of digital media, including hypertexts and Web-based fiction; textual adventure games/Interactive Fictions (IFs); and text-based multi-user discourses (MUDs). It will also address the role of narrative in structuring and shaping artefacts of contemporary popular culture that are exclusive to screen media, such as Web-logs (or "blogs") and video games.

(Source: Course website.)

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.

As scholars in an English Department, we think we know what authorship is. In this course, we will be rethinking the basic tenets of texts and authors as they exist and are evolving in a digital age. This means that we need to explore and redefine what reading, writing, viewing, and their related tools, platforms, and skills (including books, screens, literacies, markup, content, data, etc.) are in the present moment. This course will be transdisciplinary and should be of interest to anyone who works or wants to work in the fields of reading, writing, publishing, multimedia, critical thinking and creative production. Key authorship topics that we will explore and experiment in will include creativity and copyright, downloading and uploading, remixing, the globalization of information, identity, commodifiction, tactical media, markup, spatialization, visualization and augmentation. The political issues we will grapple with will include identity formation in a global age, citizenship, ethics, intellectual property rights, consumerism, disobedience, and consumerism. From the interactivity of the 70s to the participatory culture of the social media revolution to the mobilization of occupiers via mobile media, we will explore how citizens write and write themselves into culture in a digital age.

We will also undertake hands-on explorations of software, social media, markup and publishing models. All software will be freely available on computers in Lab, or, for the most part, online or for download.

Textbooks: • Dilger, Bradley & Jeff Rice, Eds. From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 978-0-8166-6609-6• Lunenfeld, Peter. The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2011. 978-0-262-01547-9. • Karaganis, Joe, Ed. Structures of Participation. New York: Social Science Research Council, 2007. (http://www.ssrc.org/workspace/images/crm/new_publication_3/%7B6a130b0a-234a-de11-afac-001cc477ec70%7D.pdf), • Poster, Mark. Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines. Durham and London: Duke, 2006. 978-0-8223-3839-0. • Raley, Rita. Tactical Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 978-0-8166-5151-1

(Source: Course website)

In this seminar, students will have the unique opportunity to gain real-world experience in publishing designing e-books for Cuneiform Press. Students will explore the relationships between theory and practice, tradition and innovation, history and the ever-changing technological and aesthetic trends in publication design. Beginning with a real manuscript by an authority in the field of the book, students will be involved in making critical decisions about the manuscript’s evolution into print. Books will be designed page-by- page, word-by-word, letter-by-letter, and all the spaces in between. Reading, the generation of meaning, is always defined by a text’s relationship to its context and vice versa. Words, images, positive and negative spaces, are all integral parts of the book, which must be understood as a whole if it is to do the text justice. The seminar focuses on the process by which ideas are developed, revised and introduced to readers. Emphasis will be placed on technical and creative thinking.

An increasing number of careers require some design and print production knowledge, and the principles of this seminar (such as legibility, symmetry, and modalities of communication) can be applied to all fields and mediums of design. Students will come away with a sound understanding of the following skills: typesetting; specification sheets; terms of the trade; building and using grids; producing mockups; correcting proofs; making design presentations; preparing files for film output; working with a printer; and working within a budget.

OBJECTIVES

• Explore book design as a craft and art

• Develop relationships between content, form and style

• Understand digital reproduction techniques for visual communication

• Learn the technical skills required to prepare digital files for print

• Sharpen verbal and visual communication skills

• Participate in efficient problem-solving

• Write copy and perform research on author’s publishing histories

• Apply historical, cultural and aesthetic concepts to contemporary manuscripts

READINGS

The books required for this seminar are available in the campus bookstore. If a student chooses to purchase elsewhere, it is their responsibility to insure that they have the correct edition. Please note that in addition to the required course books there will be manuscripts to read and edit along with supplementary readings.

• Nigel French’s InDesign Type (second edition)

• Johanna Drucker’s SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing

• Jessica Heldfand’s Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media and Visual Culture

• N Katherine Hayles’ Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary

It is also required that all written assignments comply with the standards set in the Chicago Manual of Style. Chicago is essential for authors, editors, proofreaders, indexers, copywriters, designers and publishers in any field, and will serve students in the industry long after graduation. It is available where most books are sold and in an online version through the campus library, if you prefer. Students are required to bring all of their required books to all seminars.

(Source: Course syllabus)

COURSE DESCRIPTIONWhat happens to literature and its study when text moves from page to screen? This course examines works of digital literature (literature created on the computer to be read on the computer) to understand how this emergent literary form affects the way we read, study, and understand literature. The course situates digital literature within literary history, examining connections to print hypertextual narrative, concrete poetry, OULIPO constraint-driven experiments, and other lineages. However, we also consider digital literature as a new form whose art “object” possesses computer-driven aesthetics— such as speed, animation, and multimodal semiotics— that produce decisively different literary effects and reading practices.

We will examine a varied collection of digital literature and genres including hypertext, interactive fiction, and kinetic poetry by such writers as Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, Erik Loyer, Jason Nelson, and Judd Morrissey. Our study will be bolstered by readings in theory and criticism by Katherine Hayles, Janet Murray, Lev Manovich, and others. Moving between creative and critical works in print and digital formats, we will strive to understand the state of this new literary field and its relation to print literature and traditional methods of literary study.

What happens to literature and its study when text moves from page to screen? This course examines works of digital literature (literature created on the computer to be read on the computer) to understand how this emergent literary form affects the way we read, study, and understand literature. The course situates digital literature within literary history, examining connections to print hypertextual narrative, concrete poetry, OULIPO constraint-driven experiments, and other lineages. However, we also consider digital literature as a new form whose art “object” possesses computer-driven aesthetics— such as speed, animation, and multimodal semiotics— that produce decisively different literary effects and reading practices.

We will examine a varied collection of digital literature and genres including hypertext, interactive fiction, and kinetic poetry by such writers as Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, Erik Loyer, Nick Montfort, and Judd Morrissey. Our study will be bolstered by readings in theory and criticism by Katherine Hayles, Lev Manovich, and others. Moving between creative and critical works in print and digital formats, we will strive to understand the state of this new literary field and its relation to print literature and traditional methods of literary study.

Since this a course on digital literature wherein we will practice media-specific analysis, this website is a space for the extension of our classroom dialogue. Students will share critical responses in digital form in individual blogspaces connected to this main space. This blog component is meant to be a space for students to explore ideas, collect notes, present assignments, and extend the boundaries of our seminar.

This course is taught by Jessica Pressman (Assistant Professor of English).

In this course we will examine a range of digital poems side-by-side earlier, bookbound poems to establish the extent to which digital poems are a continuation or a definitive break from what has come before. We will also look at the surface-level effects of these digital poems and try to establish a working vocabulary for critiquing these 21st century literary artifacts; further, we will look at how these poems have been constructed—what software has been used or hacked to create these word objects? What can we learn from studying these works at the level of the code? We will also explore the ways in which the language of digital poems mimics or becomes an object, sometimes complete with its own emergent behavior. Throughout the semester we will also have the opportunity to compare our findings with the authors’ intentions through videoconference meetings and/or online discussion forums. Further, since this course is as focused on the making and doing of digital poetry as much as on the critique and literary study of these poems, at the end of the semester we will have a “demo day” where you will exhibit for students and faculty the digital poems you will have created in response to the poems we will have studied in class.

(Source: Course syllabus)

This course will serve as a graduate-level introduction not only to the field of electronic literature generally and digital poetry in particular, but it will also be a kind of laboratory in which we'll experiment with the limits of literary interpretation. How do we account for texts which are dynamic, emergent, constantly shifting and morphing? If description is the best we can hope for, is description then a form of interpretation? It is my hope that, in conjunction with both live and virutal guest lectures by digital poetry practitioners we will together create a working vocabulary for reading works of electronic literature. Our course will be organized into five broad units: 1) digital poetry and the illegible; 2) reading digital poetry into/out of the early twentieth century avant- garde (through movements such as Dada, Futurism, Vorticism, Imagism); 3) reading digital poetry into/out of concrete poetry from the 1950s and 1960s; 4) procedural writing, computer-generated poetry and code-work; 5) contemporary conceptual writing as digital poetry.

(Source: Course Syllabus)