Crowdsourcing an Electronic Literature Course Description
A few of my English department colleagues and myself are preparing to propose a new Electronic Literature course, to replace a more vaguely named “Textual Media” class in the university course catalog. Here is an incredibly first draft version of the course description, building in part on language from the Electronic Literature Organization’s own description of electronic literature:
Electronic Literature (3 credits) In this course we will read and analyze electronic literature, expressive texts that are born digital and can only be read, interacted with, or otherwise experienced in a digital environment. Contemporary writers, artists, and designers are producing a wide range of electronic literature, including hypertext fiction, kinetic poetry, interactive fiction, computer-generated texts, digital mapping, and online collaborative writing projects. In all of these cases, electronic literature takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts of stand-alone or networked computers. Such literary texts often demand new reading and interpretative practices, as well as the development of a procedural literacy, which will be a primary goal of the class.
I’m eager to hear any feedback about this purposefully generic description. If you truly want to get involved, I set up a PBWorks wiki for the course description, where we can comment and revise away till the fourth horseman cometh (or until the proposal is due in front of the curriculum committee). You simply need to register for a free PB Works account to edit the wiki.
Tags: e-literature | teaching
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5 Responses to “Crowdsourcing an Electronic Literature Course Description”.
One major, major component of the course that I would add……would be a few weeks of WRITING E-Lit….on creating some works….even small works.
Obviously at some point…we would all want courses on Interactive Video Fiction from 1990-2000……but at this point most courses are introductory and thus should involve some practice based element.
If you want…I would be glad to send across some ideas for teaching E-Lit writing to beginners that aren’t tech heavy.
Jason Nelson
I think you might need to expand your definition a bit. “Expressive texts that are born digital and can only be read, interacted with, or otherwise experienced in a digital environment” excludes, for example, “Longestpoemintheworld.com”, which was discussed on this site back in August – rhyming couplets put together from Twitter by some kind of electronic sampling gismo. You could print this out on paper just as well as reading it on a website – you’d need an awful lot of paper, but the electronic element lies in how the thing was produced rather than the end product. So I think you need another clause along the lines of “or which could not have been produced without computerised means”.
I would echo the above comment. I have taught periodically on the Royal Holloway Poetic Practice program, which encourages theory-based research alongside ongoing practice in digital writing.
Even fairly simplistic writing assignments can be real eye-openers to students. These can range from dedicating workshops to learning the basics of dedicated apps like Dreamweaver, to simply asking students to use Word to create basic hypertextual documents. Anything which achieves a shift in writing practices through the relevant application of technology.
I sat in on a class at Brown’s Electronic Writing II module (which at the time was being taught by Aya Karpinska) and there were some fascinating writing projects on the go by students. Not all of these were strictly electronic though they were developed from engagement with various forms of electronic literature. Regardless, the ongoing practice was clearly affected by and helpful toward their research.
John
@Jason, I definitely agree that the writing component is essential. My emphasis on production intensifies, in fact, with each new iteration of my new media course. And every time, there are a new batch of tools out there that make the creation of digital narrative more accessible. My latest class produced very evocative pieces using Google Maps, the numerous timeline sites, and even Facebook, through a series of fake profiles and wall posts.
@Edward, your point about my narrow definition is well taken. The “born digital” concept comes via Katherine Hayles, but you’re right, once the text is digitally born, it is sometimes possible to experience it in a printed form. The key word to change is probably “only.” So the new concept might read “Expressive texts that are born digital and intended to be read, interacted with, or otherwise experienced in a digital environment.”
But then, I don’t really like that word “intended,” because it gets into authorial intent, and some of the most provocative uses of texts (digital and otherwise) are directly at odds with the intentions of the original author(s)/creator(s)/designer(s).
What I really want to get at is that reading e-lit would be an impoverished experience if it were read in a non-digital environment.
I think the description works well (and agree that adding writing is important). Maybe my reason for liking it so much is that it is very similar to a description I developed for a course I am currently teaching for the first time.
Warning: What follows is somewhat off topic.
It’s been a scary semester as I feel I am barely a step ahead of the students most of the time. I didn’t even know about the stuff I’m teaching until a little over a year ago when I had a summer curriculum development grant to look into the possibilities for an “applied information technology” course suitable for English majors.
The biggest obstacle I find to incorporating writing experience is the cost of software. We have absolutely no budget to purchase software and I cannot in good conscience ask my students (most of whom are first-generation college students from working class homes) to purchase software. While I’ve found some helpful freeware, compatibility with both windows and Macs is not always workable. To top it off, my IT department has not been all that helpful as they are in the midst of huge transitions.
I find some of the ideas Mark has mentioned (with Google Maps, for instance) intriguing, but since I’ve never seen a work like he’s describing, I will again have to familiarize myself before introducing the possibility to students.
I would greatly appreciate it if those readers who have more experience in teaching this material and these kinds of projects would send me some ideas for how to address this problem. Please send them to me directly rather than adding more off-topic messages to this discussion.
Barbara Liu
blittleliu@cox.net
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