Engl507

Format

This seminar is project-based, meaning you will iteratively develop your own research based on your existing interests. Through a scaffold of assignments (or “research logs”), you will share stages of this research with me and your peers, present it at the semester’s end (in the form of a public panel), and integrate it into a scholarly essay about literature and culture. The essay will be “web-ready” and published online (but it does not need to be public or discoverable; for instance, it can be password-protected). Rather than selecting a topic new to you, I encourage you to build upon research you’ve already done in a particular research area, literary period, or domain of cultural study. This way, you can determine how (if at all) computational or multimodal techniques meaningfully shape existing approaches to your work.

Each of our seminar meetings will usually involve the following:

• Lecture: I will speak for approximately thirty minutes, introducing terms, histories, and issues for future discussion.
• Workshop: For approximately sixty to ninety minutes, we will collectively experiment with a particular language, tool, platform, or approach related to digital literary studies. Between meetings, you will be asked to apply what you learned during these workshops.
• Seminar Discussion: For approximately thirty minutes, we will chat as a group about the workshop, lecture, and/or readings.

You should arrive to each meeting having read the required texts, which are listed in the course outline.