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:

• Workshop: For up to two hours, 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 up to an hour, we will chat as a group about the workshop and/or readings. During these discussions, I may decide to listen, without much (if any) intervention in the conversation. I may also decide to briefly lecture about a given topic.

You should arrive to each meeting having read the required texts, which are listed in the course outline. You are also welcome to read the related texts. I list them in the course outline largely because I may reference them during conversations. But I don't expect you to read them.