English 194 Wiki:About

From English 194 Wiki

This is an undergraduate research workshop or practicum (limited to 15 students) in which participants break into teams to pursue research related to literature and the culture of information. (The course may be counted for the English Dept's specialization in Literature and the Culture of Information.) The theme of this instance of the course is the relation between literary interpretation and other paradigms of knowledge, especially those that the new digital media and technologies are bringing into conjunction with the humanities. Students will create projects that experiment with literary interpretation by transforming it into such things as a "game," "simulation," "model," "experiment," "hypertext," "blog," "map," etc. (For example, students might build a computer simulation using the NetLogo program, play a "game" of literary interpretation like Jerome McGann's and Johanna Drucker's Ivanhoe Game, create a statistical representation or visualization of a text, create a GIS satellite-image-based map related to literature, create a blog in which the "contributors" are the characters in a novel, etc.). Student research will be published on a collective, online research Web site produced through a "wiki"publishing and editing environment that enacts the process of creative collaboration. Readings will include Franco Moretti's short book, Graphs, Maps,Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, parts of Willard McCarty's Humanities Computing, plus other print and online readings designed to stimulate thought about the issues.

Prerequisites: a prior course in the English 146AA-ZZ, 147AA-ZZ, or 148AA-ZZ series. (If you have taken other lower-division courses in the Literature and Culture of Information specialization, including English 10LCI and English 25, and would like to use those as your prerequisite, please consult the instructor. Students who have taken a previous instance of English 194 can take this new instance of the course as an independent study.)

M,W 3:00–4:15 pm, South Hall 2509 (Transcriptions Studio)
Catalog Number (Enroll code): 17335
Instructor contact: ayliu@english dot ucsb dot edu