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Syllabus

Week 1: Paradigms of Communication

Thursday 1.15

Class

  • Discussion: What's a medium? What is the future of reading?
  • Claude Shannon's diagram and its variants (powerpoint available here)

Friday 1.16

  • Workshop: Using nfomedia (the class wiki software); write a brief bio of yourself. Include your academic interests.

Week 2: The Evolution of Language

Thursday 1.22

Class

  • Documentary: "Let There Be Words: The Origins of Human Language"

Assignments Due Today

  • McQuail, Denis. "Four Models of Communication." McQuail's Mass Communication Theory. pp 68-75. (Blackboard)
  • Hall, Stuart. "Encoding/Decoding." (Blackboard)
  • Siskin, Clifford. "Textual Culture in the History of the Real." pp. 118 - 130. (Blackboard)

Friday 1.23

  • Workshop: Construct a timeline of your personal experience with communications media. What is the first medium you remember using? What media have been added to your experience along the way? And what is the most recent addition? And, finally, which media no longer play any role in your life? There are probably some media that still exist, that you may even still use, but that play a smaller part in your life than they used to. Include those as well.

Week 3: Language and Oral Culture

Thursday 1.29

Class

  • What's on YouTube? Woody Allen checks in with Marshall McLuhan.
  • Problem: Transition from orality to literacy.

Assignments Due Today

  • Journal Entry: The nature and shaping effects of a medium: applying what you learned about communication theory to oral culture. Choose a model of communication theory from McQuail (Mass Communication Theory) and/or Stuart Hall and consider how that model applies to oral culture as described by Ong and/or McLuhan and/or the special case depicted in Dalrymple's article.
  • Dalrymple, William. "Homer in India." The New Yorker
  • Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. excerpts on oral culture
  • McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. excerpts on oral culture
  • Oral Composition: Milman Parry, Albert Lord, and John Miles Foley

Friday 1.30

Assignments Due Today

  • Journal Entry: Text-Based Timeline.

Week 4: Reading and Writing in the Past

Thursday 2.5

Class

  • What's on YouTube?
  • Documentary: "Civilization to Colonization: Language Takes Written Form"

Assignments Due Today

  • Journal Entry: Respond to Gaur's "A History of Writing." (Also continue working on your interactive timeline.)
  • Gaur, Albertine. A History of Writing. 13-47, 149-64. Please note: In Blackboard, the second selection of Gaur's is listed as "The position of scribes in society."

Friday 2.6

  • Workshop: Team projects.

Week 5: Problems in Writing

Thursday, 2.12

  • Team Presentations: Problems in Writing.

Assignments Due Today

  • Email Rachel a copy of your powerpoint, or the link to an interactive timeline, so that your project can become a resource on the class site.

Friday, 2.13

  • Workshop: Paleography session with John Chandler. NOTE: This session will take place in Robbins Library.

Assignments Due Today

  • Blog Post: Post the link to your interactive timeline to the course blog. Comment on at least two other timelines.

Week 6: The Gutenberg Galaxy

Thursday, 2.19

Class

  • 3.30: Session in Rush Rhees Special Collections (with Pablo Alvarez): an array of early printed books.

Assignments Due Today

  • Journal Entry: Respond to McLuhan.
  • McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Excerpts: "A New Translation of Culture;" "Typography Invades Manuscript Culture;" "The Galaxy Reconfigured."

Friday, 2.20

  • Workshop: The Virtual Bookshelf. Each team chooses for further study one of the early books that Pablo Alvarez assembled. Investigate the full history of the book from its origin to its current location by asking such questions as:
  1. Who printed it, under what circumstances?
  2. How can I recognize the physical object? What are its identifying characteristics? size, paper, font(s), binding, etc. (Examine a bookseller's catalogue for good examples of such bibliographical descriptions.)
  3. What does it look like? Reproduce (with digital images) key aspects of the book.
  4. Where did it come from? Map the provenance of the book from its place of origin to Rochester.

Week 7: The Gutenberg Galaxy

Thursday, 2.26

Class

  • Early Print Culture

Assignments Due Today

  • Journal Entry
  • Eisenstein, Elizabeth. "An Essay on Some Features of Print Culture" and "The Expanding Republic of Letters. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. 42-107.

Friday, 2.27

  • Workshop: Timemaps with Nora Dimmock.

Week 8: The Gutenberg Galaxy

Thursday, 3.5

Class

  • Copyrighting text and images

Assignments Due Today

  • Journal Entry
  • Swift, Jonathan. "On Poetry: A Rapsody." (1733) [Note: You will need a UR computer for access to this reading, or log in through Voyager if you are off-campus.]
  • Kernan, Alvin. Printing Technology, Letters, & Samuel Johnson. (1987)
    • Introduction (pp 3-7)
    • Chapter 2: Printing, Bookselling, Readers, and Writers in Eighteenth-Century London (pp 48-70)
    • "Copyright and the Writer's Identity" (pp 97-102)
  • St. Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period.
    • Chapter 1: Reading and Its Consequences (pp 10-18)
    • Chapter 3: Intellectual Property (pp 43-65)
    • Chapter 20: "Reading, Reception, and Dissemination." (pp 394-412)

Friday, 3.6

  • Workshop: Timemap Teamwork

Week 9

Spring Break

Week 10: Picture Problems in the Galaxy

Thursday, 3.19

Class

  • Imaging in the Age of Print: The Urge to Look
  • Visual Satire in the age of Hogarth
  • The "exactly repeatable image": Lithography & Photography

Assignments Due Today

  • Journal Entry
  • Ivins, William. Prints and Visual Communication. Available here through the UR network.
    • Chapter 1: Introduction
    • Chapter 2: The Road Block Broken
    • Chapter 4: The Tyranny of the Rule: The 17th and 18th Centuries
    • Chapter 5: The Tyranny Broken: The 19th Century

Friday, 3.20

  • Workshop: Timemap Teamwork

Week 11: A New Kind of Book: The Case of William Blake

Thursday, 3.26

Class

  • Timemap Presentations

Assignments Due Today

Friday, 3.27

  • Workshop: The William Blake Archive
  • Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
  • Journal Entry: Use the Image Search Tool in the Blake Archive to explore the images on MHH 15. The Image Search tool attempts to make it possible for you to find any image in Blake's illuminated books, and to find all images related to it. On plate 15 you'll note that there are several interlinear images (little people, squiggles, etc.) in addition to the large primary image at the bottom of the plate. Compare the image searching you did using the Image Search tool in the Blake Archive to the results you get by using another image-searching tool, such as Google Image Search, Flickr, etc. Describe your results.

Week 12: A New Kind of Book: E-Readers and Digital Books

Tuesday, 3.31

  • Screening of Helvetica
    • Gleason Theater
    • 6pm

Thursday, 4.2

Class

  • Digital Literacy, Digital Books, and Electronic Conversations
  • Informal presentations: Half the class will read selections for "The (Digital) Page," and the other half with read "Digital Literacy." In class, each group will present summaries of the readings to the rest of the class. Some of these articles/posts are short, others are more lengthy. These are but snippets of the conversations surrounding these issues, as they are unfolding in online articles, blogs, and comments. Take advantage of the digital media here - skim comments, click links, and try to get a sense of the larger, connected context of these pieces.

Assignments Due Today

  • Journal Entry
  • The (Digital) Page
    • Visel, Dan. Correspondences if:book: A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book. 31 January 2009.
  • Digital Literacy
    • Rosen, Christine. People of the Screen The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society Fall 2008.

Friday, 4.3

Week 13: A Brief History of the Internet

Thursday, 4.9

Class

Assignments Due Today

  • Journal Entry
  • Juskalian, Russ. Interview with Clay Shirky Part I and Part II Columbia Journalism Review. 19 December 2008.
  • Recommended Reading

Friday, 4.10

    • Please type your transcription in either Word or notepad and save as a .txt file.

Week 14: The Future of Publishing

Thursday, 4.16

Class

Assignments Due Today

  • Journal Entry

Friday, 4.17

  • Workshop: E-Readers with Susan Gibbons
  • Assignments Due Today
    • Journal Entry: Record your experience transcribing a Douglass letter. Reflect on the media and media translations/transformations involved.

Week 15: The Google Generation

Thursday, 4.23

Class

  • Visions of the Future: Mind and Machine
  • The Google Generation in the Classroom

Assignments Due Today

  • Journal Entry

*Visions of the Future: Mind and Machine

  • Kurzweil, Raymond.
    • Interview on Computerworld. 11 November 2007.
    • Additional comments from Computerworld interview here and here. 13 November 2007.

*The Google Generation in the Classroom

Friday, 4.24

  • Assignments Due Today
    • Do some light research on your letter(s) so that you can add explanatory notes during the lab session.

Wednesday, 4.29

Assignments Due Today

  • Transcriptions (HTML files with annotations)

Friday, May 1

  • All work is due, no exceptions.
 
 
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