Daily Schedule
WEEK ONE - INTRODUCTION TO TEXTUAL MEDIA
Tuesday, August 30
What is Textual media? Digital Textuality? New Media? What about the technical stuff? Email, blog, web accounts.
- Word Perhect
- Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (Bust Down the Doors! and All Fall Down)
Thursday, September 1
- Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, pages 1-23, found in the course reader (CR)
- Jay David Bolter, Writing Space, pages 23-26, 40-46, and 91-98 (CR)
- A recent debate on Grand Text Auto about Aarseth’s neologisms ("cybertext" and "ergodic")
- A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems by Raymond Queneau is a famous example of what Aarseth calls a "cybertext"
- Aarseth thinks of texts as labyrinths or mazes
- The book Maze, by Christopher Mason (1985)
WEEK TWO - LEARNING FROM OLD MEDIA
Tuesday, September 6
- Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, pages 1-90
- Scott McCloud on Filling in Narrative Gaps
Thursday, September 8
- If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, pages 91-131
- Workshop on links and navigation, including an introduction to setting up your own webspace
- Exploratory Writing on Calvino Assigned
WEEK THREE - READERS AND WRITERS
Tuesday, September 13
- If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, pages 132-209
- * Exploratory Writing on Calvino due *
Thursday, September 15
- If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, pages 210-259
WEEK FOUR - CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
Tuesday, September 20
- Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality, pages 204-224 (CR)
- * Exploratory Writing on Calvino (revised ) due *
Thursday, September 22
- Narrative as Virtual Reality, pages 242-270 (CR)
- Choose Your Own Adventure
WEEK FIVE - INTERACTIVE FICTION
Tuesday, September 27
- Nick Montfort, Twisty Little Passages, pages 95-117 (CR)
- To Play: Adventure and Zork
- In Class: Eliza
Thursday, September 29
- To Play: Galatea
- In Class: The Implementor’s Creed
- Other IF to consider: Phototopia and Varicella by Adam Cadre; Shade by Andrew Plotkin
- * Choose Your Own Adventure Media Analysis due *
WEEK SIX - INTERACTIVE FICTION, TAKE TWO
Tuesday, October 4
- Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, pages 1-137
- To Play: Mystery House Taken Over
Thursday, October 6
- Understanding Comics, pages 138-215
- To Play: Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- Workshop on Digital Stories
WEEK SEVEN - HYPERTEXT AND HYPERFICTION
Tuesday, October 11
- No Class: Monday-Tuesday Switch Day
Thursday, October 13
- Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think” from the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly
- Two Types of Hypertext: Mercury and Mercury
- J. Yellowlees Douglas, Gaps, Maps and Perception: What Hypertext Readers (Don’t) Do
- Stuart Moulthrop, Hegirascope
WEEK EIGHT
Tuesday, October 18
- More Hegirascope
- Hegirascope Exploratory Assignment Due
Thursday, October 20
- Michael Joyce, Afternoon
WEEK NINE
Tuesday, October 25
- Afternoon
- Writing Space, pages 121-130 (CP)
Thursday, October 27
- Stuart Moulthrop, The Color of Television (1996) and Pax (2003)
- Media Analysis Workshop
WEEK TEN - TEXTUAL MACHINES, TEXTUAL ENGINES
Tuesday, November 1
- Word Clouds, Dynamic Text, and other experiments in typology and meaning
- Alternumerics, Name Voyager, NewsMap, GoogleBrowser, Someone Keeps Stealing My Letters, The Intruder, 10×10, Wordcount, Understanding Vorn
Thursday, November 3
- In-class Peer Review
- * Draft of Media Analysis #2 Due *
WEEK ELEVEN - THE LANGUAGE OF NEW MEDIA
Tuesday, November 8
- * Media Analysis #2 Due *
- In class: Poems that Go (The Jabberwocky Engine, Conversation, Walking Together What Remains, Fields of Dreams), and Jason Nelson, "Nine Attempts to Clone a Poem" and "Superstitious Appliances"
Thursday, November 10
- Lexia to Perplexia by Talan Memmott
- The Personalization of Complexity by Marjorie Coverley Luiesebrink
- The Bomar Gene by Jason Nelson
WEEK TWELVE - NEW MEDIA AND THE CULTURAL PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
Tuesday, November 15
- Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, pages 19-61 (CR)
- Sunshine ‘69
- Brickfilms and Oblong Pictures (See, for instance, Out of Time)
Thursday, November 17
- The story of the digital archive
- Gary Wolf, “The Great Library of Amazonia” from Wired
- The Internet Archive
Tuesday, November 22
- Explore American Memory
- In-class: A-Bomb WWW Museum, United States Holocaust Museum, Abandoned Missile Bass VR Tour, Barnum’s Lost Museum, September 11 Digital Archive, The Valley of the Shadow
Thursday, November 24
- No Class: Thanksgiving
WEEK FOURTEEN - NEW MEDIA AND THE CULTURAL PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
Tuesday, November 29
- Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era by Roy Rosenzweig
- Consider different digital cultural archives
- Cultural Archive New Media Analysis Workshop
Thursday, December 1
- Cultural Archive New Media Analysis Workshop
WEEK FIFTEEN
Tuesday, December 6
- Cultural Archive Analyses Presentations
Thursday, December 8
- Links to the beginning: What is Textual Media again?
- New Media Analysis #3 due in Class