ENGL 8203: Modernism and Digital Humanities

ENGL 8203: Modernism and Digital Humanities

 

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Week 1 (1/9): Introduction

Course overview, tour of DH projects on modernism.
 
 
Week 2 (1/23): Reading Magazines (presentation: Bill)
  • George Bornstein, “How to Read a Page” (D)
  • Scholes and Wulfman, “Modernity and the Rise of Modernism: A Review” from Modernism in the Magazines (D)
 
Pick a magazine from the Modernist Journals Project in which to examine a subject of interest to you, making sure to read the introduction provided on the site in order to gain a sense of the kind of magazine it was (a little magazine, a coterie magazine, a politically-oriented one, etc.). The items you focus on can be anything you like: poems, fiction, advertisements, graphical section markers, covers, reader correspondence, book lists, questionnaires, or any mix of these.
 
Select five items from the magazine that have some sort of coherence (thematic, generic, political – whatever) and record the bibliographic information about them (item title, author, genre, publication date, page numbers). Bring this to class.
 
Lab: In class, we will add these items to the course website timeline in order to have a discussion about how your pieces fit with other items historically, editorially, and in other ways. What does this sort of practice in networked media add to literary study?
 
 
Week 3 (1/30): A Portrait of the Artist in Context (presentation: Holly)
  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
  • Franco Moretti, “Graphs, Maps, Trees,” pp. 1-2.
  • Tanya Clement, “‘a thing not beginning and not ending’: using digital tools to distant-read Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 23:3 (2008): 361-81. (D)
  • Examine the issues of The Egoist in the MJP in which the Portrait is serialized and jot down some interesting coherences or differences from the other content you find there.
 
Add five items to the course website timeline that are interesting to you in relation to Portrait and be prepared to discuss them in class.
 
Lab: Cluster analysis.
 
 
Week 4 (2/6): Ulysses in The Little Review (presentation: Karen)
  • Read the introductory material for The Little Review at the MJP and spend some time reading through the magazine for things of interest to you. Gain a general sense of the magazine.
  • Read the “Hades” episode of Ulysses in the September 1918 issue of The Little Review and jot down some interesting coherences or differences from other content you find there. Think about these also in the context of WWI. Be prepared to discuss all of these.
  • Read the “Graphs” chapter of Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees. (pp. 3-33)
 
Look at the website http://gephi.org to familiarize yourself with the Gephi network graphing software and what it does.
 
Lab: Network graphing.
 
 
Week 5 (2/13): Ulysses and New Media
(NO PRESENTATION)
 
 
Week 6 (2/20): Tarr and the Modernist Versions Project (presentation: Robert)
Tarr, by Wyndham Lewis.
 
Look at the Modernist Versions Project headed by Stephen Ross at the University of Victoria:
 
Skype Interview with Stephen Ross?
 
Lab: Juxta and versioning.
 
 
Week 7 (2/27): Tarr and BLAST (presentation: Jonathan)
  • Read introductory material for BLAST magazine in the MJP and familiarize yourself with both issues. Add five items to the timeline that you think are interesting in relation to Tarr.
  • Read the “Trees” chapter of Moretti (pp. 67-92)
  • Trip to Special Collections to view the original.
 
Lab: Various graphing activities with BLAST and Tarr.
 
 
Week 8 (3/5): The Waste Land and Archival Poetics (presentation: Emma)
 
Lab: Archive generation.
 
 
Week 9 (3/12): Archival Theory (presentation: Kent)
  • Archive Fever, by Jacques Derrida
  • Find a digital archive or two that embody some aspect of “mal d’archive” and be prepared to discuss in class.
 
Lab: Archive generation.
 
SPRING BREAK MARCH 19-23
 
Week 10 (3/26): Proust and Multimedia Archives
  • “Combray” section of Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust (pp. 1-264)
  • “A Rationale of Hypertext,” by Jerome McGann (D)
  • Familiarize yourself with the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive: http://proustarchive.org
 
Lab: Image/Text/Archive
 
 
Week 11(4/2): Proust and Places
  • Read the “Swann in Love” and “Place Names: The Name” sections of Swann’s Way (pp. 265-606)
  • The “Maps” chapter of Moretti (pp. 35-64)
  • Stephen Ramsay, “In Praise of Pattern” (D)
 
Lab: Mapping and Proust.
 
 
Week 12 (4/9): Three Guineas, Text/Image, and Editorial Issues (presentation: Lindi)
  • Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf
  • Look at the Atlantic Monthly issues serializing Three Guineas
  • Selections from Maggie Humm (TBA)
 
Lab: Editorial theory and text/image.
 
 
Week 13 (4/16): Magazines and TEI Markup
  • Read the two issues of BLAST at the MJP.
  • Scholes and Wulfman: “Rethinking Modernist Magazines: From Genre to Database” (D)
  • James Cummings, “The Text Encoding Initiative and the Study of Literature” (CDLS)
  • Look at the TEI website: http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/
 
Lab: TEI Markup
 
 
Week 14 (4/23)
  • Read the Afterward of Moretti
  • Final project presentations