How have literacy and literature changed in the age of Twitter, Facebook, video games, big data, cell phones, interactive narratives, and textual markup? How do digital technologies influence how we read, write, and even think? How does texting change how we write and talk? How are Facebook and Google adjusting our relationship to writing, memory, and culture? In what ways can digital archives change how we write and conduct research? What exactly is digital literacy and why is it so important? How will it change the future of literature in a digital age?
This course will engage digital literacy as both a concept and a practice, offering students an introduction to the critical perspectives and tools needed to understand, critique, and participate in our contemporary digital environment. In addition to surveying the history of writing and the role of technology in the humanities, we will investigate the cultural, cognitive, and aesthetic consequences that digital technologies have on conventional notions of literature and literacy. From a practical perspective, this course is designed to help students approach new technology, new software, and new programs with curiosity and confidence, equipping them with the skills needed to understand and critique the digital humanities. Students will learn how to use and manipulate the basic building blocks of writing in digital environments (text, sound, image, video, design, and interactivity), while experimenting with multimedia composing tools and learning about the basic principles of markup, metadata, and archival research. In the process, the course will investigate digital literacy from a variety of perspectives, exploring issues like the problem of attention and distraction online; the influence of emojis and social media on writing; the role of machine reading in literary analysis; and the evolution of art, storytelling, and other cultural forms in the wake of digital computers.
In addition to the primary texts, readings will include examples of digital art, electronic literature, interactive storytelling, and videogames.
