Part I: Cyberspace

Monday, August 21 (Week 1)

• Introduction to the syllabus, schedule, and enduring concepts

Wednesday, August 23

• William Gibson, Neuromancer, chapter 1

Friday, August 25

• Neuromancer, chapters 2-7
• Sign up for a Davidson Domain (if you don’t have one already) and set up a blog for DIG 101

Monday, August 28 (Week 2)

• Neuromancer, chapters 8-12
• Jay David Bolter, “Remediation” from The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media (2014)
• Blog (Round 1): Group A

Wednesday, August 30

• Neuromancer, chapters 13-18
• Ed Finn, “Building the Star Trek Computer” from What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (2017)
• Blog (Round 1): Group B

Friday, September 1

• Lab 1: Close and Computational Reading

Monday, September 4 (Week 3)

• Neuromancer, chapters 19-24
• Blog (Round 1): Group C
• Lab 1 due by 5pm on Tuesday, September 5

Part II: When Old Technologies Were New

Wednesday, September 6

• Jason Farman, “When Kaleidoscopes Were as Distracting as Smartphones” from Atlas Obscura (2015)
• Snapchat Research Story project handed out
• Blog (Round 2): Group A

Friday, September 8

• Carolyn Marvin, “Community and Class Order” from When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (1988)
• Blog (Round 2): Group B

Monday, September 11 (Week 4)

• Kenneth Gergen, “The Challenge of Absent Presence” from Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance (2002)
• Lee Humphreys, “Social Topography in a Wireless Era: The Negotiation of Public and Private Space” from Journal of Technical Writing & Communication (2005)
• Blog (Round 2): Group C

Part III: The Internet

Wednesday, September 13

• Roy Rosenzweig, “Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet” from The American Historical Review (1998)
• Blog (Round 3): Group A

Friday, September 15

• Lab 2: The Dark Web

Monday, September 18 (Week 5)

• Sign up for Hypothesis and install the Chrome extension. With the PDF below open in your browser, sign in to the Hypothesis add-on in Chrome, and you can see annotations and highlights from other readers. Add your own comments and highlighting. See this video tutorial for help.
• Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, “Where the Internet Lives: Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructure” from Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (2015)
• Blog (Round 3): Group B

Wednesday, September 20

• Ingrid Burrington, “The Environmental Toll of a Netflix Binge” from The Atlantic (Dec. 2015)
• Blog (Round 3): Group C

Friday, September 22

• Snapchat Research Story due

Part IV: Things on the Internet

Monday, September 25 (Week 6)

• Richard Harper, et al., “What Is a File?” (MSR-TR-2011-109) from Microsoft Research (2011)
• Blog (Round 4): Group A

Wednesday, September 27

• Jason Eppink, “A Brief History of the GIF (so Far)” from Journal of Visual Culture (2014)
• Kate M. Miltner and Tim Highfield, “Never Gonna GIF You Up: Analyzing the Cultural Significance of the Animated GIF” from Social Media + Society (July 2017)
• Blog (Round 4): Group B

Friday, September 29

• Paul Soulellis, “The Download: Dennis Cooper’s GIF Novels” from Rhizome (2016)
• Lab 3: Animated GIFs

Monday, October 2 (Week 7)

• Lauren Michele Jackson, “We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in GIFs” from Teen Vogue (2017)
• Blog (Round 4): Group C

Wednesday, October 4

• Lisa Nakamura, “‘I WILL DO EVERYthing That Am Asked’: Scambaiting, Digital Show-Space, and the Racial Violence of Social Media” from Journal of Visual Culture (2014)
• Blog (Round 5): Group A

Friday, October 6

• Sarah T. Roberts, “Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Laborers’ Dirty Work” from The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online  (2016)
• Blog (Round 5): Group B

Monday, October 9 (Week 8)

Fall Break – No Class

Wednesday, October 11

• Whitney Phillips, “We’re the Reason We Can’t Have Nice Things on the Internet” from Quartz (2015)
• Patt Morrison, “Privilege Makes Them Do It — What a Study of Internet Trolls Reveals” from Los Angeles Times (2015)
• Blog (Round 5): Group C

Friday, October 13

• Lab 4: Trolls

Part V: Software, Algorithms, and Data

Monday, October 16 (Week 9)

• Paul Ford, “The Great Works of Software” (2014)
• Jason Farman, “Fidget Spinners: How Buffer Icons Have Shaped Our Sense of Time” (2017)
• Blog (Round 6): Group A

Wednesday, October 18

• Jonathan Sterne, “The MP3 as Cultural Artifact” from New Media & Society (2006)
• Blog (Round 6): Group B

Friday, October 20

• Samuel Woolley, et al., “How to Think About Bots” from Motherboard (2016)
• Blog (Round 6): Group C

Monday, October 23 (Week 10)

• George Dvorsky, “The 10 Algorithms That Dominate Our World” from Io9 (2014)
  
• Safiya Umoja Noble, “Google Search: Hyper-Visibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible” from InVisible Culture (2013)
• Blog (Round 7): Group A

Wednesday, October 25

• Mark Sample, “Code” from Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon (2016)
• The Naked Game (2008) [Flash Required]
• Mark Sample, “Criminal Code: The Procedural Logic of Crime in Videogames”  (2011)
• In-Class: SimCity/Micropolis source code
• Blog (Round 7): Group B

Friday, October 27

• Trevor Owens, “Glitching Files for Understanding: Avoiding Screen Essentialism in Three Easy Steps” from The Signal (2012)
• Lab 5: Glitching Files (Out of class lab)

Monday, October 30 (Week 11)

• Lev Manovich, “The Database” from The Language of New Media (2001)
• Blog (Round 7): Group C

Wednesday, November 1

• “The Entire History of You” from season 1, episode 3 of Black Mirror (2011)
• In-class: “The Entire History of You” scene analysis

Friday, November 3

• “The Entire History of You” continued

Monday, November 6 (Week 12)

• Lab 6 (Black Mirror) – done out of class
  

Part VI: Digital Tools

Wednesday, November 8

• Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz” (1942)
• Close Reading, Distant Reading

Friday, November 10

• Text Analysis

Monday, November 13 (Week 13)

• Working with the Corpus of Historical American English

Wednesday, November 15

• Lev Manovich, “Media Visualization: Visual Techniques for Exploring Large Media Collections” (2011)
• Lab 7: Image Analysis

Friday, November 17

• Introduction of Final Projects

Monday, November 20 – Friday, November 24 (Week 14)

No class

Monday, November 27 (Week 15)

• Workshopping Final Projects (only half of class will meet: students with last names A-K)

Wednesday, November 29

• Workshopping Final Projects (only half of class will meet: students with last names L-Z)

Friday, December 1

• Skeleton of Final Project due in class