The 20th Century

Whether a video game adaptation of Walden or a digital map of London authors, digital tools increasingly shape how we study and represent literature. This course will expose students to scholarly conversations about critical making - the notion that making is a form of intellectual, scholarly praxis. Students will gain hands-on experience creating digital, scholarly objects. Students will learn about the Critical Making movement and how it engages significant theoretical movements in literary studies, including new media theory, affect theory, feminist theory, and archival studies. We will read texts by authors including Safiya Noble (Algorithms of Oppression), Bill Endres ("A Literacy of Building"), and Sasha Costanza-Chock (Design Justice). Students will learn tools for creating scholarly objects that engage literature, such as digital maps, interactive visualizations, and videogames. We will think critically about the tools we are using and the objects we are making, situating them among a rich, interdisciplinary body of scholarship. By the end of the semester, students will have created a digital object and written an essay about how the process of creation informed their scholarly praxis. There are no prerequisites for this course; no prior experience with digital technology or the digital humanities is required.
Course Attributes:

The 20th Century

ENGLISH LITERATURE 523

Section 01