In this course, students will learn about and experiment with new ways of approaching novels via the “digital humanities.”  Digital humanities means many things, but for our purposes, it emphasizes the use of digital tools and spaces to create new ways of reading and writing about a literary form (the novel) that was the dominant entertainment platform, so to speak, of the nineteenth century.

We will choose three “primary texts”–most likely, novellas of some kind— but this is not a literature course, and the texts will really serve as “specimens” for our experiments. The subtitle of the course is “doing things with novels,” and we will indeed do things other than merely reading novels and writing about them. Together we will build things and share them, with each other and the broader public: we will produce an audiobook, create an annotated or otherwise enhanced version of a public-domain novella, and “play” a novel by taking on the roles of various characters in and around the text using the Ivanhoe theme in WordPress.

By the end of the course, students will have learned new skills and, more importantly, new ways of thinking about what novels can be and do in an era when reading increasingly happens on interconnected screens.

Course requirements: rigorous reading, informal writing (on a course blog), enthusiastic participation, participation in group digital projects and a final essay or project.

You can learn more about yours truly here.

The header image depicts a detail from the installation “Books Cascade” by the visual artist Alicia Martin and was taken by Ana Lisa Aperovich: CC2.0.