description

This is a crash course in how writing lives are changing because of digitality.

We will only begin to count the ways.

Current 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 and produce across these areas, to consider 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. We will also be using several digital technologies to produce and explore the mixed modalities of digital texts.

By the end of class, you should understand how and why the digitization and networking of writing are not simply shifts in tools. You should have some understanding of how and why, therefore, notions of rhetoric need to shift if we are to use digital writing and communication technologies effectively and creatively. You ought to have some sense, too, of just how much room for pleasure and change there is for you to make -- as researcher, teacher, writer -- in all this stuff.

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Each class meeting will have two parts: we will start by discussing the reading for the week, and will end with demos of software and/or time for you to explore software to your own ends.

For each class, I ask you to do some reading, to do some writing about the reading, to respond to others’ writing, and -- on occasion -- to have a short digital text prepared.

For the end of the semester, you will develop projects growing out of your particular research interests and grounded in class readings and discussions. If you are a technical writer, for example, you could research gaming interfaces as interfaces for communicating about technical concepts, to produce writing in a conventional research paper format or to produce a digital interface that questions interactive representations of gender, class, or ethnicity. If you are a creative writer you could research online interactive poetry or could produce poetry that considers distributed reading practices. If you are a writing teacher you could research implementations of multimodality in composition programs or could develop an online learning activity to guide students in distant readings. See the calendar for a more detailed description of these projects.