[Go to Course Site] Digital technologies and methods have recently become important in the humanities as scholars use the new tools not only to help read and write about literary, historical, and artistic materials in traditional ways but in new ways influenced–not just communicated by–the new media forms. Literature+ is a course that draws on the new fields of “digital humanities” and “new media studies” to ask students to think about, and experiment with, how new digital methods enhance the study of literature.
          Students choose a literary work and use digital methods to model, map, visualize, text-analyze, social-network-analyze, blog, or otherwise interpret it using new tools and media. How can such methods augment or change our understanding of literature by comparison with other methods of literary interpretation? What is the relation, for example, between “close reading” of literary texts and “distant reading” methods that identify trends in language or themes across thousands of texts?… [more]