WINTER 2008 COURSE:ENGLISH 236 - Literature Plus: Cross-Disciplinary Models of Literary Interpretation
Instructor: Alan Liu
New day and room: Thursday 11:00am-1:30pm, SH 2509
Because of the recent, shared emphasis in many fields on digital methods, scholars in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences increasingly need to collaborate across disciplines. This course reflects theoretically and practically on the new, digitally-facilitated interdisciplinarity by asking students to choose a literary work and treat it according to one or more of the research paradigms prevalent in other fields of study.
Students, for example, could choose a story or poem to "model," "simulate," "map," "visualize," "encode," "text-analyze," "sample," analyze statistically, "storyboard," "blog," or redesign as a "game," "hypertext," or "virtual world."
What are the strengths and weaknesses of one kind of research paradigm by comparison with others, including the new paradigms in the literary field that some scholars have recently called "distance reading" (as opposed to "close reading") and "modeling"? For instance, what is the relation between "interpreting" and and data-mining or visualizing?
The course begins with discussion of selected readings and demos to set the stage. Readings include: Franco Moretti's _Graphs, Maps, Trees_, Willard McCarty's _Humanities Computing_, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's _Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals_, and Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuel's essay on "Deformance and Interpretation." Demos include: the NetLogo agent-modeling environment, the Scratch visual programming environment, digital mapping tools, text-analysis programs, the Ivanhoe literary interpretation game, visualization and pattern-discovery tools, Second Life, and other online or downloadable resources usable by non-programmers to create interesting projects.
After the initial unit of the course, students break into teams, choose a literary work, and collaborate in workshop/lab mode to produce a "proof-of-concept" final project. (Alternatively, students may work individually on projects designed to support or complement their intended dissertation topics.) Collaboration will occur both face-to-face and virtually in a class wiki (possibly supplemented by virtual meetings in the UCSB English Department's new Second Life instructional space). Final projects can be digital, video, acoustic, material, social, or some combination, but some digital representation must be created that can be exhibited on the class wiki or in the English Department's gallery space in Second Life. Individual students also prepare research reports as well as write a final essay reflecting on the project.
http://www.english.ucsb.edu/courses-detail.asp?CourseID=2010