• Enrollment / Sign-up sheet / auditors (project and short assignments)
• Texts for course
• Course log-in for protected materials
• Course site: http://english236s2012.pbworks.com
• Printing from the site: "PDF Version" at bottom right of each page 
• To-Do for Next Class: create your class bio
  
  
  

Course Structure and Assignments

• Schedule
• Assignments

❦ Interdisciplinary Rationale

• Alan Liu, "Digital Humanities and Academic Change," English Language Notes 47 (2009), special issue on "Experimental Literary Education": 17-35 [locked resource; course login required]
• Articles resulting from the 2008 version of this course, forthcoming in Investigating Digital Tools, Texts, and Use Practices: Collaborative Approaches to Research in English Studies, ed. Laura McGrath
• Monica Bulger, Jessica C. Murphy, Jeff Scheible, and Elizabeth Lagresa, "Interdisciplinary Knowledge Work: Digital Textual Analysis Tools and Their Affordances" (manuscript) [locked resource; course login required]
• Alan Liu, "'So What': New Tools and New Humanities Paradigms" (response to above; manuscript) [locked resource; course login required]

❦ Disciplinary Rationale: From Close Reading to "Distant Reading"

John Crowe Ransom, "Criticism, Inc." (1937)
    "It is strange, but nobody seems to have told us what exactly is the proper business of criticism. There are many critics who might tell us, but for the most part they are amateurs. So have the critics nearly always been amateurs; including the best ones. They have not been trained to criticism so much as they have simply undertaken a job for which no specific qualifications were required. It is far too likely that what they call criticism when they produce it is not the real thing. . . .
        Rather than occasional criticism by amateurs, I should think the whole enterprise might be seriously taken in hand by professionals. Perhaps I use a distasteful figure, but I have the idea that what we need is Criticism, Inc., or Criticism, Ltd."

Katherine Hayles, "How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine," ADE Bulletin, no. 150 (2010):
    "To explore why this should be so and open possibilities for synergistic interactions, I begin by revisiting that sacred icon of literary studies, close reading. When literary studies expanded its purview in the 1970s and 1980s, it turned to reading many different kinds of “texts,” from Donald Duck to fashion clothing, television programs to prison architecture (see Scholes). This expansion into diverse textual realms meant that literature was no longer the de facto center of the field. Faced with the loss of this traditional center, literary scholars found a replacement in close reading, the one thing virtually all literary scholars know how to do well and agree is important. Close reading then assumed a preeminent role as the essence of the disciplinary identity."

• What is "Close Reading"?
• What is "Distant Reading"?

❦ "Humanities Computing"--

• Roberto Busa, S.J. (and associates), Index Thomisticus (begun in 1946; web edition in 2005 by Eduardo Bernot and Enrique Alarcón)

• Computational Linguistics and Text Analysis (roots of ALLC, ACH, and TEI)
  --from ALLC Mission Statement: "The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing was founded in 1973 with the purpose of supporting the application of computing in the study of language and literature. As the range of available and relevant computing techniques in the humanities has increased, the interests of the Association's members have necessarily broadened, to encompass not only text analysis and language corpora, but also history, art history, music, manuscript studies, image processing and electronic editions."

• Jerome J. McGann, "Literary Scholarship in the Digital Future," The Chronicle Review [Chronicle of Higher Education], 49.16 (13 Dec. 2002): B7
  
  
• [Cf. philological and textual-editing traditions descended from the 19th century--e.g., the OED] [image]
  
  
• Unassimilated or incompletely assimilated contemporaneous approaches: hypertext theory, electronic literature, new media studies, network critique