| ENG287H1, Summer 2012 Lectures Tuesdays and Thursdays, 6-9pm Room: MS 3154 |
Instructor: Adam Hammond Office: JHB 801 Office Hours: Thursdays, 3-5pm E-mail: adam.hammond@utoronto.ca |
Current Notices
- The syallbus for the summer 2012 section of ENG287H1S, "The Digital Text," will be posted here shortly.
- The archived syllabus for the Fall 2011 section of ENG287H1F can be viewed here. (The summer section will differ in its increased focus on born-digital fiction and on analyzing the impact of digital culture on traditional print media. Since the summer section does not have tutorial sections, it will not include hands-on experience with the TEI encoding language.)
- The class project resulting from the Fall 2011 section of ENG287H1F, He Do the Police in Different Voices, is online here. It is due for a major update in the spring of 2012.
Course Description
Ours is the first generation to study literature in the digital age. E-books are outselling paperbacks; online scholarly databases are superseding library stacks; new works are being composed, distributed, and consumed electronically. How fundamental is this shift toward digitization? How does it affect the nature of the literary text, and how does it impact our work as readers and critics?
This course explores the creative and interpretive possibilities opened up by the proliferation of digital literary texts. We will use computer-assisted analysis and visualization to ask new questions about literature and to provide statistical grounds for answers to older questions. We will analyze various genres of digital-born fiction — interactive fiction, hypertext, video games, webcomics, etc. — to question how such texts alter the role of the interpreter and affect the task of interpretation. We will explore how digital culture is changing the way that print works are being read and written.
Students will gain hands-on experience with and develop skills in quantitative computer-assisted analysis. No programming experience is required.