ENGL 3196/COMM 3000: Orality, Literacy, and Computer Technology 

T/Th 11:00-12:15, Room 3113

COMMONS GROUP HOME PAGE

Group Forum for discussion *** Group FILES for readings

Course Description:

We read on telephones. We video chat from computers. We express ourselves with pictographic emoji in “text” messages or in comments “sound on!”. Spoken and written traditions confound and compound one another in the age of the internet and social media — as they have done for thousands of years. This course aims to address shifts from orality to literacy to computer to technology. By examining what literature is and becomes alongside technology, we will consider how we communicate. Our primary focus will be on the ways technologies of communication result from and simultaneously influence the ways we think.

Learning goals:

To dig into the history of communications media

To consider theoretical approaches to media and compare them across contexts

To gain a working vocabulary of current Digital Humanities practices

To understand how contemporary inscriptions relate to history of the book and of oral literature

To imagine the ways technology may change us and we may change technology

To tell a story in different modalities — oral, written, digital — and analyze what’s different and what’s not.

Participation, Assignments, Conventions:

Participation is a must in this course, both oral and written. You must contribute frequently to class discussion throughout the semester in order to earn a good participation grade.

Grading:

Attendance: 5%

Participation: 10%

Weekly Response/Blog: 15%

Brief Presentation: 10%

Three Stories: 15% total (oral 5%, written 5%, digital 5%)

Short Essay or Wikipedia article: 20%

Research Paper or Final Project: 30%

Extra-credit:

Any student may receive 1 extra A for

• submitting a poem or article to an online publication
• presenting work at an open mic or conference

This class does not grade on a curve. The assessment tools used will be: class/team participation; blog; rubrics; peer evaluation; homework assignments; in-class work interpreting texts and analyzing issues.

All assignments are described, including grading rubrics, on the course website.

Academic Integrity Plagiarism and cheating are unacceptable and will result, at minimum, in a grade of F or 0 for that assignment, quiz or test and, more severely, a grade of F for the course. “The faculty and administration of Brooklyn College support an environment free from cheating and plagiarism. Each student is responsible for being aware of what constitutes cheating and plagiarism and for avoiding both. If a faculty member suspects a violation of academic integrity and, upon investigation, confirms that violation, or if the student admits the violation, the faculty member MUST report the violation.” For the complete text of the CUNY Academic Integrity Policy and the Brooklyn College procedure for policy implementation go to www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/bc/policies.

Course Schedule and Readings

*SUBJECT TO CHANGE! Changes will be announced in class and posted on the group site.*

Week 1: Introduction

Aug 28

Tell your own literacy autobiography (speaking, reading, writing, computing)

In class:

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. p 569-578

Rich, Adrienne. The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984. “Culture and Anarchy,” “From Morning-glory to Petersburg” “For the Record”

Ligon, Glenn. Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background), 1990. https://www.whitney.org/Exhibitions/GlennLigon#artworks-7

 

Aug 30

Calvino, Italo. “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” from The Uses of Literature: Essays. Harcourt Brace, 2009.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. 2009.

In class: Durham, Jimmie.”The Center of the World (The Direction of my Thought)—Direct from my New Home in Eurasia—” in Two poems in BOMB magazine. https://youtu.be/MGcbSItN2gY

due: Oral Storytelling

Sunday, September 2 Last day to add a course

Week 2: Orality: What’s Oral Culture?

Sept 4: Where the course came from

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word. Routledge, 1988.

New York Public Library Oral History Project http://oralhistory.nypl.org/

Optional: Mary Carruthers. “Collective Memory and Memoria Rerum.” The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images 400-1200. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

 

Sept 6: Telling stories

Brothers Grimm, “Hansel and Gretel”

Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2007.

Optional: Aden, Sam. “Haunter.”

Optional: https://www.themoth.org/

 

Week 3: Literacy: Putting It On Paper

Sept 11 no class

Sept 13

Plato. “Thamus and Theuth” Phaedrus 274b–278d. (370 BC)

D. F. McKenzie. “The Sociology of a Text: Orality, Literacy, and Print in early New Zealand.” The Book History Reader . eds. David Finkelstein, Alistair McCleery. Routledge, 2006.

Marie Battiste. “Print Culture and Decolonizing the University: Indigenizing the Page: Part 1.” The Future of the Page . University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Optional: L.M. Findlay. “Print Culture and Decolonizing the University: Indigenizing the Page: Part 2.” The Future of the Page . University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Introduce Wikipedia

Sunday, September 16 Last day to drop a course without a grade

Week 4: Literacy: The Media is the Message

Sept 18 no class

Sept 20

NYPL Oral History Project DUE

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man. The MIT Press, 2013.

Carey, James W. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Routledge, 2009.

Rosner, Max and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina. “Literacy.”

 

Week 5: These Things Called Books

Sept 25 Print Revolution

Elizabeth Eisenstein. “Defining the Initial Shift: Some Features of Print Culture.” The Book History Reader. eds. David Finkelstein, Alistair McCleery. Routledge, 2006.

Optional: Adrian Johns. “The Book of Nature and the Nature of the Book.” The Book History Reader. eds. David Finkelstein, Alistair McCleery. Routledge, 2006.

Optional: Bellis, Mary. “The History of Printing and Printing Processes.”

Sept 27 Literacy: Educating Empire

Harold Innis. Empire and Communications. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950. Read “Introduction.” available on Gutenberg Canada.

Bhabha, Homi K. “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985, pp. 144–165. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1343466.

Week 6: Technology and War and Cybernetics, oh my!

Oct 2: Machines

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1936.

Vannevar Bush. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic, 1944.

Optional: Friedrich Kittler. “Introduction.” Gramophone, Film, Typewriter . Stanford University Press, 1999.

Optional: Brian Winston. “Introduction.” Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. Routledge, 1998.

Optional: E. M. Forster. The Machine Stops. 1909.

Oct 4: Posthuman

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2010. selections

Lisa Nakamura, “Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet” in Works and Days, Volume 13, 181-193, 1995.

In class:

Week 7: Computers:

Oct 9: Imagining Computers

Nelson, Theodor Holm. Literary Machines: Edition 87.1. Published by the author, 1987.

Optional: Nelson, Ted. Computer Lib/Dream Machines. http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-21-nelson.pdf

Winston, Brian. “The Coming of the Microcomputer.” Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. Routledge, 1998.

In class:

due: Written Storytelling

Oct 11: Networks

Jones, Steve. “ The Emergence of the Digital Humanities (as the Network Is Everting)” in Gold, Matthew K., and Lauren F. Klein. Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Optional: Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. MIT Press, 2011.

Optional: Roy Rosenzweig, “Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet” American Historical Review (December 1998)  Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2649970

Optional: Tim Berners-Lee, “Information Management: A Proposal.” CERN (1989).  Available online: http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

Optional: Cory Doctorow, Little Brother, Ch. 1-12.

due: Wikipedia assignment

Week 8: Messaging is the Media

Oct 16

Milne, Esther. Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. PAGES 137-162.

Optional: Brunton, Finn. Spam: a Shadow History of the Internet. MIT Press Ltd, 2015.

Oct 18:

Nunes, Mark. “The Email, The Letter, and The Post.” from Cyberspaces of Everyday Life. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

 

Week 9: Print to Pixel: Visualization

Oct 23: From Print to Digital

Drucker, Johanna. “From A to Screen.” Comparative Textual Media, University of Minnesota Press, 2013, pp. 71–96, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt5hjjtq.8.

Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: toward a Media History of Documents. Duke University Press, 2014. Selection

Kirschenbaum, Matt. Track Changes. Preface and Introduction, optional: Chapt. 1

Oct 25: Digital Visualization

Manovich, Lev. “What Is Visualization?” Paj:The Journal of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture, vol. 2, no. 1, Dec. 2010. journals.tdl.org, https://journals.tdl.org/paj/index.php/paj/article/view/19.

Lauren Klein, “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings” American Literature 84 vol 4, 661-688

Optional: Stephen Few, “Data Visualization for Human Perception“

Optional: Mark Sample: “The Digital Humanities is not about building, it’s about sharing.“

Optional: Lauren Klein, “The Long Arc of Visual Display” (video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heUI6QmSdzc

Visualization projects: check out

“History Flow” – http://www.bewitched.com/historyflow.html

Ben Fry, “On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces” http://benfry.com/traces/

Explore the Visual Complexity website – http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

Živadinović, Stevan. Hobo Lobo of Hammelin — what is a scrolling comic?

 

Week 10: Listening

Oct 30 Radio

Brian Winston. “Wireless and Radio.” Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. Routledge, 1998.

Brian Winston. “The Capture of Sound.” Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. Routledge, 1998.

Marshall McLuhan on sound, from the medium is the MASSAGE: An Inventory of Effects , produced by Jerome Agel. Penguin Books, 1967.

In class:

due: NYPL Oral History reflection

Nov 1 Active Listening

Ochoa Gautier, Ana María. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Duke University Press, 2014.

OPTIONAL:

Doug Boyd Oral History in the Digital Age

Browse:

Locus Sonus SoundMap

John Barber course site

Spoken word: Staceyann Chinn “All oppression is connected” (2007)

In class:

due: Idea for final project/paper (1-2 sentences)

 

Tuesday, November 6 Last day to withdraw from course with a W (non-penalty) grade

Week 11: Reading Alone and Together

Nov 6: Disappearing texts

The Agrippa Files: http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu.

Elizabeth McHenry. “Forgotten Readers: Recovering the lost history of African American literary societies.” The Book History Reader. eds. David Finkelstein, Alistair McCleery. Routledge, 2006.

Rita Raley. “TXTual Practice.” Comparative Textual Media. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

optional : Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. MIT Press, 2012.

In class:

due: Computer Technology Storytelling

Nov 8: Social Reading

Debates in the Digital Humanities – http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu

Scalar – http://scalar.usc.edu/

Book Traces – http://www.booktraces.org/

Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence – http://www.modesofexistence.org/

Medium – http://medium.com

 

Week 12: Social Media Twitterbots and Snapchat

Nov 13: Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook

Watch Aja Monet, “Mobilizing a Movement of the Mind”

Watch Theorizing the Web panel “The Virality of Evil” (watch on Youtube)

Tiidenberg, Katrin, Annette Markham, Gabriel Pereira, Mads Rehder, Ramona Dremljuga, Jannek K. Sommer, and Meghan Dougherty. 2017. “‘I’m an Addict’ and Other Sensemaking Devices: A Discourse Analysis of Self-Reflections on Lived Experience of Social Media.” In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Media & Society  – #SMSociety17, 1–10. Toronto, ON, Canada: ACM Press. doi:10.1145/3097286.3097307.

Manovich, Lev. Selfie City

OPTIONAL: Optional: Michael Mandiberg, ed., The Social Media Reader, NYU Press, 2012. (available on archive.org)

Twitterbot resources:

Resources: Darius Kazemi, “How to make a Twitter bot” http://tinysubversions.com/2013/09/how-to-make-a-twitter-bot/index.html

Patrick Rodriguez, “Making Twitterbots with Google Apps Script (Part 1)” http://thelightaesthetic.com/making-twitterbots-with-google-apps-script-part-1/

Rob Dubbin, “The Rise of Twitter Bots” http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-rise-of-twitter-bots

Mary C. Long, “How to Make a Twitter Bot in Five Minutes” http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/twitter-bot/479038?red=at

Students asked to attend CUNY DHI Lightning Talks, participation encouraged

opportunity to communicate ideas in progress — Nov 13 6:30pm at the GC

Nov 15: Hashtag Activism

Read Demby, “Combing Through 41 Million Tweets to Show How #BlackLivesMatter Exploded”

Read Stephens, “Social Media Helps Black Lives Matter Fight the Power”

Read Moira Weigel, “Internet of Women”

If you attended the CUNY DHI Lightning Talks, please write a short paragraph about the project you found most interesting describing what the main purpose of the project is, what technologies it uses, and who the target audience is.

If you cannot attend, find an article online about social media. Write a short paragraph about what the source argues, what platform it addresses, where it is published, whether it seems reputable, etc. Be prepared to share in class.

 

Week 13: Data and Data literacy and Search

Nov 20, Nov 22

READ “Is Google Making Us Stupid” by Nicholas Carr.

What has changed in the last 10 years? Do you think his concerns have been addressed or do you think things have gotten worse?

Carr, Nicholas. 2008. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic. July 1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE:

Nunes, Mark. “The Email, The Letter, and The Post.” from Cyberspaces of Everyday Life. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Marshall McLuhan. the medium is the MASSAGE: An Inventory of Effects , produced by Jerome Agel. Penguin Books, 1967.

 

Week 14:  Lightning talks; Students present their final projects

Nov 27, Nov 29

Each student will speak for 3 minutes (1-2 slides) on the thesis of their final project, the project’s modality (whether written or otherwise recorded), and plans for execution.

ADD YOUR SLIDE HERE. Add a slide with your name and project title before your slides.

Week 15: Lightning talks continue and Peer Review

Dec. 4 PEER REVIEW! Bring 3-5 pages to exchange with a friend. EVERYONE MUST EDIT THEIR WORK.

Dec. 6 Peer Review – Everyone should come to class with a printed version of a draft of their final paper or project statement. In class, partners will review each other’s essays and give constructive feedback.

 

Week 16:  

Dec. 11 Final projects due in class

 

For Digital Projects:

Chris Stein, Contexts and Practicalities

What Does What/How to Get things done:

long history of Agile Development

37 Signals, Getting Real (2009). Esp 2-74

This announcement, made February 5th, 2014.

Miriam Posner, How did they make that?

Bamboo DiRT, a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use.

 

With thanks to Sharona Levy and Mary Catherine Kinniburgh for sharing their syllabuses

to ITP Core I and Core II faculty Michael Mandiberg, Lisa Brundage, and Maura Smale

to Aaron Plasek for further media studies and data sources

and to Matt Gold’s Text Transformations seminar

 

Some Useful Information:

 

Useful dates:

Monday, August 27 Weekday classes begin

Sunday, September 2 Last day to add a course

Wednesday, September 5 Conversion Day; Classes follow a Monday Schedule

Last day to file for elective course Pass/Fail

Saturday, September 8 Weekend classes begin

Sunday, September 16 Last day to drop a course without a grade

Tuesday, November 6 Last day to withdraw from course with a W (non-penalty) grade

 

Pertinent Policies:

Academic Integrity Plagiarism and cheating are unacceptable and will result, at minimum, in a grade of F or 0 for that assignment, quiz or test and, more severely, a grade of F for the course. “The faculty and administration of Brooklyn College support an environment free from cheating and plagiarism. Each student is responsible for being aware of what constitutes cheating and plagiarism and for avoiding both. If a faculty member suspects a violation of academic integrity and, upon investigation, confirms that violation, or if the student admits the violation, the faculty member MUST report the violation.” For the complete text of the CUNY Academic Integrity Policy and the Brooklyn College procedure for policy implementation go to www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/bc/policies.

 

In order to receive disability-related academic accommodations students must first be registered with the Center for Student Disability Services. Students who have a documented disability or suspect they may have a disability are invited to set up an appointment with the Director of the Center for Student Disability Services, Ms. Valerie Stewart-Lovell at (718) 951-5538. If you have already registered with the Center for Student Disability Services, please provide me with the course accommodation form and discuss your specific accommodation with me.

 

Please see the Brooklyn College website for the Student Bereavement Policy and the state law regarding non-attendance because of religious beliefs on page 66 of the Undergraduate Bulletin.