ENG 1131 Writing through Media
Section: 01G9
Class Meetings: M-F 4 and MW 6-7 (Classes 12:30-1:45 PM Monday through Friday; screenings/labs 3:30-6:15 PM Monday and Wednesday)
Locations: Online via Canvas (due to Covid-19 considerations)
Syllabus: Click here to view/download
Writing through Digital Media
Since the beginning of the “Information Age” in the mid-to-late twentieth century, the word “digital” has been used with increasing frequency to refer to certain technologies and media. Though “digital” has its roots in numerical data, it now serves as a catch-all for any form of media that was, wholly or in part, created using electronic technologies or distributed using electronic means. Today, “digital” is so ubiquitous that we often use the term as a way of saying “not-physical” or “not-analog.” Digital is now our norm.
What, then, is “digital media,” and what does “digital” mean for storytelling in the twenty-first century? In an age of ebooks, online archives, and streaming services, where do we draw the line between the “physical” and the “digital”? How has the creation, expansion, and transformation of the Internet affected the ways in which we produce, distribute, and experience stories across different media?
In this course, we will explore a selection of digital and digitized fiction, comics, video, audio, multimedia works, and games that can be accessed and interacted with using only an Internet browser. We will approach these materials with attentiveness to relationships among form, format, and content, the advantages and disadvantages of digital modes of storytelling, and issues of copyright, longevity, and accessibility. Key assignments include short response papers, a digital annotation project, an electronic narrative writing project, and a final paper project that incorporates a proposal, a short presentation, and peer review.
This course confers CLAS General Education credit for either Composition (C) or Humanities (H), as well as 6,000 of the University of Florida’s 24,000-word writing requirement (WR).
