Fall 2017

ENL240: Medieval Literature – Seeta Chaganti

ENL 280:  Digitizing the Early Modern 
Gina Bloom (English, Associate Professor of English) and Carl Stahmer (Director of Digital Scholarship, University Library)
Mondays 12:10-3:00 PM
This course investigates a wide range of digital projects in early modern studies in order to open up a conversation about the practical challenges and theoretical stakes of research in the digital humanities and arts. Although we will provide a bit of a backstage tour of the digital tools used to create these projects, the aim of the course is less to train students in the nuts and bolts of programming for a digital project than it is to understand what each digital project aims to do and how its design facilitates those aims. How have digital projects in early modern studies been enabled and handicapped by the affordances of the tools available for project design?  What questions and approaches to early modern texts and topics are easiest to answer or pursue with these tools? What sorts of tools would need to be developed or altered to help early modernists pursue different questions or approaches? As we study particular digital projects, we will read scholarship on and about these projects—some, though not all of it, produced by the project makers. In so doing, we hope to explore how digital projects are, simultaneously, objects of research as well as modalities for research, and to consider more broadly the relationship between making and theorizing. Although this course focuses on early modern material, it would be of interest to anyone interested in learning more about the digital humanities or contemplating doing work in this field.