Fall 2013 Courses

DGST 101: Introduction to Digital Studies

Zach Whalen; 10:00 – 10:50 MWF; Combs 349

Introduces an interdisciplinary approach to using technology and specifically provides a foundation for the Digital Studies Minor. Coursework may include digital approaches to creavity, historiography, media analysis and thinking critically about and through digital culture.

CPSC 106: Digital Storytelling

TBA; 6:00 – 7:15 TR; Trinkle B7

People have been telling stories since the beginning of time., but how is story telling evolving in the digital age? This course explores how computers are being used to tell stories. We’ll study text-based technologies-blogging, the web- and how those models have changed the way we publish and disseminate narratives. Well also study the roles of audio, video, and images in narrative: computer animation, the ethics of altering digital images, and the Story Corps project. Students will use technology including blogs, virtual worlds, and computer games to create and tell their own stories.

ENGL 314: Literary Journal

Michael McCarthy; 9:30 – 10:45 TR; Combs 349

A study of the contemporary national literary journal. Students also design and produce an on-line journal.

ENGL 359: Transmedia Fiction

Zach Whalen; 11:00 – 11:50 MWF; Combs 349

A survey of “transmedia fiction:” narratives conveyed simultaneously through distinct but complementary media, including film, videogames, comics, or music. Students examine major and emerging texts in this genre and engage with creative practice by producing their own transmedia work.

This course responds to the relatively recent emergence of stories that are told through <multiple simultaneous media channels. So-called “transmedia fiction” encompasses several specific genres — Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), Viral Marketing, Hoaxes, Transmedia Storytelling, etc. — which share a common emphasis on digital technology as a metaplatform for disseminating large-scale interactive narrative works of significant complexity. High-profile examples of this include ARGs used to promote new movies or TV series’ (Lost, for example), but increasingly, media consumers take for granted that the story worlds in one medium can escape traditional technological boundaries and expand into other worlds — perhaps our own. This class first approaches this phenomenon from a historical angle by placing these works in an appropriate literary context. Next, the course theorizes these undertakings by incorporating relevant narratological theory. Finally, students experiment with the craft of transmedia fiction by designing and executing their own collaborative transmedia experience.

ENGL 245: Introduction to Film Studies

Antonio Barrenechea; 6:00 – 7:15 TR; Combs 139

Equips students to analyze and understand the art of film. Emphasizes narrative film (the dominant mode of filmmaking) within the Anglophone tradition (the dominant cultural producer of film).

COMM 353: Visual Rhetoric

Anand Rao; 12:30 – 1:45 TR; Combs 114

Study of the rhetorical use of visual texts with an emphasis on the development and use of visual arguments.

ARTS 104: Digital Approaches to Fine Art

Rosemary Jesionowski; 6:00 – 7:50 MW; Melchers 209

This course introduces basic tools and techniques of computer generated art in the context of studio theory and practice.

ARTS 341: Multiple Imaging

Rosemary Jesionowski; 1:00 – 3:50 MW; Melchers 209

Prerequisite: ARTS 241A or 224

Course expands upon skill and techniques learned in Photography I and/or Printmaking I, focusing on the idea of creating images in small editions. A variety of photographic, printmaking, and digital media techniques are explored. Reading, writing, research, and speaking assignments accompany studio work.

ARTS 454: Approaches to Video Art

Carole Garmon; 12:30 – 2:15 TR; Melchers 207

Prerequisite: ARTS 101, 102, 105 or 281N AND ARTH 114A or 115A

A comprehensive look at the developement of video and other time -based media as valid art forms in contemporary art; explores the formal development , content and format of various multia media art forms.