About this e-book
____________. is a collection of e-chapters composed during a single semester (Fall 2009) at Cornish College of the Arts. The class consisted of me and sixteen students from a variety of programs in the arts. It was titled, "Introduction to Digital Humanities: Designing Literature," and throughout the semester the students and I investigated the history of non-linear narratives, the intermediation of text with images and sound, and the curious use of not only the space of the page, but also the space of the screen. The point? To stress the fact that the electronic texts and digital media with which we are so familiar today did not just suddenly emerge with the WWW or the computer. That, and to re-think how scholarship in the humanities is composed.
And what better way to become familiar with that history and scholarship than to add to them? In other words, the challenge for the class was for us to collaboratively compose a publicly accessible e-book, which you are now visiting. A few tricks popped up along the way. First, the e-book was not the only object of our attention. We studied poetry, fiction, and scholarship from roughly 1897 forward, and we aggregated our responses to the course material on a course blog. As we engaged the material, each of us started a different research trajectory, namely because we have different backgrounds and investments. Consequently, the sixteen e-chapters included here represent a broad spectrum of possible inquiries into the question of how literature is designed, by whom, and with what effects on people's perceptions of text, narrative, visuals, audio, and whatever falls in between. Now, with the course at its end, the students and I have this collection to circulate, and the students also have digital portfolios that archive the iterative development of their ideas into videos, collages, essays, poems, music, abstracts . . . you name it.
If you would like to learn more about the background of the course, then feel free to give the syllabus a gander. It's in PDF, and it includes the learning outcomes, the course policies, some background on why the course was created, and a list of some of the course material.
But more importantly, I encourage you to give each chapter a look and/or a listen. I'm happy to say that I learned a lot from each of the students in the course, and I am excited to see what, in the future, they continue to produce. In the meantime, thank you for visiting ____________., and good journeys.
All the best,
____________. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.