Instr: Anne Wysocki
Office: CRT 597; 229-4534
e-mail: awysocki@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: R 5:30pm-8:10pm; CRT 187
Discourse about digital text practices coalesces around several related nodes of particular concern to those of us who study the production and reception of texts: networked writing and the visual poetics of online texts; media convergence; intellectual property issues, control, and open source production; fast and broad data analysis; gaming.
In this class we will read into each of these areas, to consider specifically how these shifting contexts for writing -- which swirl together the technological and the social -- also shift what it is to write, to be a writer, to be an audience, to make judgments about the efficacy of texts, and to be embodied within and through texts. In addition to reading, we will be exploring online sites of text production and consumption through blogging, stepping into Second Life, and playing a game or three.
People in class will develop projects growing out of their particular research interests and grounded in class readings and discussions. A technical writer, for example, could research gaming interfaces, to produce writing in a conventional research paper format or to produce a digital interface that questions interactive representations of gender, class, or ethnicity. A creative writer could research online interactive poetry or could produce poetry that considers distributed reading practices. A writing teacher could research implementations of multimodality in composition programs or could develop an online learning activity to guide students in distant readings.
Readings for the course will be drawn from sources like the following:
Benchler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedoms.
Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics.
Drucker, Johanna. Graphesis: Visual Knowledge Production and Representation.
Eglash, Ron. African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design.
Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.
Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity.
Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History.
Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet.
Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Methods.
Saper, Craig. Networked Art.
