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Home > MSI Degree > Course Catalogue > Course Description
SI 516: Special Topics: Research and Technology in the Humanities
The broad objective of this course, designed for graduate students and upper-level undergraduate students in departments across the University, is to work with and study the theoretical implications of the tools and techniques used to create, gather, manipulate, analyze, and present electronic information both locally and via
computer networks. Students will pay special attention to the techniques available to facilitate scholarship, especially collaborative scholarship, in the humanities, and to the creation and publication of "compound documents," be they on diskette, on CD-ROM, or on network servers.
In addition to each student's pursuing work to generate an individual product, by the middle of the semester all students in the class will work in groups of four or more to tackle a real project in the humanities and produce a fairly sophisticated and substantial multimedia product. Such projects might include, for example:
- The generation of an online resource, including
historical material, video clips, class handouts, science lessons, and literary criticism in the support of the University's existing lecture/discussion course in science fiction
- The publication of a poetry anthology, using
typographical techniques and page design to get a
desired effect in digitally published paper versions, and augmented for an online version with graphic and textual critical and background materials made available through hypertextual links
- The assembly of a documentary resource annotating a series of films, complete with film clips to illustrate points
- The creation of a literary research paper using digital texts alongside images of the originally published paper texts
- The design and construction of information products, for example, a 17th-century English culture database that can be searched online and/or explored on CD-ROM or via a hypertext navigator such as Netscape, or, using similar techniques, a database exploring the uses of verbal and visual idioms across cultures
Students can take advantage of the University's capability of publishing these course projects as Web pages or CD-ROMs. The range of possible projects will be restrained only by the time available, the imagination of the students, and the concurrence of the instructor.
The course calendar indicates specific tools and
techniques to be discussed and demonstrated, topics and readings to be discussed, and work to be presented. Other tools, techniques, readings and topics will arise for the whole group and for particular project groups. Some of us necessarily will know more than others about one or more of these matters of technology or humanistic study.
Working with research technologies in the humanities may sometimes be exhilarating and sometimes frustrating but always can be satisfying if those who can help do. Thus, we will maintain what might be called an open seminar environment in which we can all teach each other. Everyone will be expected to be fully responsible to the work, the project group, and what will doubtless be a class of people diverse in backgrounds and interests. These technologies can build communities; our greatest achievements are possible only if we take advantage of the class as a community and contribute to it accordingly.
This course is offered through the English Department as English 516.
Credits: 3
Term offered: Fall
Cross Listings: ENGLISH 516, English home dept
Other Notes:
Open to SI master’s students as a cognate course in
Division 361
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