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Schedule
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last edited
by Alan Liu 1 year, 9 months ago
English 25,"Literature and the Information, Media, and Communication Revolutions" (Spring 2020, Professor Alan Liu)
Important late-breaking announcement about the final exam, which will be now a "no-fault" exam: see announcement. (The details were also sent to students by email.) Date of announcement: June 3, 2020
["X" or Experimental Version of Course for Online Instruction Only. See also supplementary Gauchospace site supporting this course.]
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See notices below about how this course has been adapted on an emergency basis for the COVID-19 virus and COLA strike situations. (See also FAQ on special course procedures in Spring 2020)
English 25 live Zoom lectures will be recorded for students who may not be able to attend at the lecture time. By default, your microphone and camera will be muted when you join the session. If you do not want to be included in the recording, simply keep your camera and microphone off.
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 = required print book All other readings are online on Web sites or as downloadable PDFs If any links to online readings break, please try their URLs in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (and notify the instructor).
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Please read all assigned readings in advance of the relevant lecture.
TAs may flag specific assigned readings to be sure to get to before each week's section discussion.
1. Overture: The Media, Communication, & Information Ages
Week 1
Class 1 (M., March 30) — Introduction
- Overview of the course topic, readings, assignments, and enrollment/section policies.
Class 2 (W., April 1) — The Idea of Media
Class 3 (F., April 3) — The Age of Orality
Week 2
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During the COLA strike by TAs, this assignment ("Create your system for working with online readings") will not be checked by the TAs. The assignment has thus been changed to optional instead of required. However, it is strongly recommended that you conduct this assignment because it will benefit your work with all the online readings in the course (and in other courses too!). |
Assignment due in section this week: "Create your system for working with online readings" Special early assignment due in section meeting this week: Create your online reading system: Because so many of the readings in this course are online, students are required to demonstrate in section to their TA that they have the means to annotate and save copies of online materials according to one of the methods described in Guide to Downloading and Managing Online Readings. For your section meeting this week, bring on your laptop or other digital device copies of the two assigned readings for Week 1 of the course (originally PDFs) plus at least one of the readings for Week 2 that was originally a Web page. These are readings that you should have downloaded, stored in an organized manner, and highlighted or otherwise annotated. If you do not own a laptop, tablet, or other digital device, then bring a printed copy of one assigned reading.
Class 4 (M., April 6) — (Continued)
- [Continued from previous class]
Class 5 (W., April 8) — The Rise of Literacy
Class 6 (F., April 10) — Reading in the Information Age?
- Distracted Reading
- "Distant Reading" and Data Mining
Week 3
Class 7 (M., April 13) — "Strange Books"
- Familiarize yourself with the following three artist's books (for a definition of "artist's book," see Wikipedia article):
- Agrippa: A Book of the Dead, an artist's-book created in 1982 by Kevin Begos, Jr., Dennis Ashbaugh, and William Gibson. The work is documented on The Agrippa Files, which was created by UCSB English Dept. faculty and students in 2005.
Read the following pages on The Agrippa Files site to learn about the artist's book. (Note: the site is useable without the Flash reader that some of its pages feature. Ignore the Flash features if you are not able to run Flash on your device.) :
- Shelley Jackson
- "Snow" (2014-) (poem written in the media forms of snow and Instagram) (Note: if you have an Instagram account, you can keep scrolling down to the beginning of the poem, but even without an account you can see enough to get a sense of the nature of the work.)
- Scott Rettbert and Shelley Jackson, "Room for So Much World: A Conversation with Shelley Jackson" (2019) (Read the first half of the interview related to "Snow")
- Danny Cannizzaro and Samantha Gorman, Pry (2014)
- Trailer video preview of Pry, a novel in the form of an Apple iOS app for iPad (Note: you do not need to buy the iOS app; it will be shown in lecture)
2. Focus on: The Rise of Digital Media/Communication/Information
Class 8 (W., April 15) — The Communications Revolution & the Digital Principle
Class 9 (F., April 17) — Computer Revolution (1): History of the Computer
Week 4
Class 10 (M., April 20) — Computer Revolution (2): Rise of the Network
Class 11 (W., April 22) — Computer Revolution (3): Emergence of Digital "New Media"
- Digital "New Media"
- Lev Manovitch, The Language of New Media (2001):

- pp. 18-48 (this starts at p. 30 of the PDF file: the section titled "What is New Media?")
- 218-28 (this starts at p. 134 of the PDF file)
- "Web 2.0"
Fiction Unit
Class 12 (F., April 24) — Fiction and Modern Media, Communication, & Information
- Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) -- read at least to page 88 by today's class. (Print book; available at UCEN Bookstore and elsewhere)

- Help on the concept of entropy
Assignment due by email to your TA by 11:59 pm, Pacific Daylight Time, April 24: Essay 1 on the Future of Computing
Week 5
Class 13 (M., April 27) — (Continued)
- Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) -- finish rest of the novel. (Print book)

Class 14 (W., April 29) — (Continued)
- Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) -- finish rest of the novel. (Print book)

Class 15 (F., May 1) — (Continued)
- Conclusion of lectures on The Crying of Lot 49
- Discussion with professor on the novel
Week 6
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During the COVID-19 virus situation, the midterm exam will be taken by students in online form through the GauchoSpace site for the course. The exam is designed to be 50 minutes long, but students will have a 60 minutes between starting the exam and submitting it (to allow for any delays or technical problems in the online test-taking process). The window of time during which students can start the timed, 60-minute exam will open at 8:00 a.m. and close at 8:00 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time on May 4th. (Special time affordances will be established for DSP students.) Watch for course announcements with further details as Professor Liu designs the online exam. |
Class 16 (M., May 4) — [Midterm Exam]
- Exam on readings in the course to date to be taken on the course Gauchospace site here. The exam is primarily "factual," and is designed to reward students who have regularly kept up with the assignments and attended lectures and sections. See fuller description. (No blue books needed for exam.)
3. The Postindustrial & Neoliberal Age
Information's Impact on Work and Power
Class 17 (W., May 6) — Postindustrial "Knowledge Work"
- "Scientific Management" (The Original "Smart Work")
- Frederick Winslow Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (1911)
- "Knowledge Work" (Today's Smart Work)
- Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), pp. 82-84 (on "creative destruction")
- Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988), pp., 3-12

- Joseph H. Boyett and Henry P. Conn, Workplace 2000 (1992), pp. 1-45

- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline (1990), pp. 3-14

Class 18 (F,. May 8) — Neoliberal "Networked Society"
Week 7
Class 19 (M., May 11) — Against All the Above
- Early "Cyberlibertarianism"
Update: Deadline extended to May 13 -- Assignment due by email to your TA by 11:29 pm, Pacific Daylight Time, May 11: Essay 2 on Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49
Class 20 (W., May 13) — (Continued)
- Donna J. Haraway, Excerpts from "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1985), chapter 8 in her book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991)
-- The PDF contains the whole book. Read only following excerpts from the "A Cyborg Manifesto" chapter in the book:
- pp. 149-155
- pp. 161-165
- pp. 170-173
- p. 181
- Continuation of above lectures, plus discussion with the professor.
Fiction Unit
Class 21 (F., May 15) — Fiction About Postindustrial/Neoliberal Work & Power
- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984), read half the novel by this class (Print book; available at UCEN Bookstore and elsewhere)

Week 8
Class 22 (M., May 18) — (Continued)
- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984), finish the novel. (Print book)

Class 23 (W., May 20) — (Continued)
- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984), finish the novel. (Print book)

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If the COLA strike by TAs is still continuing at this time in the quarter, this assignment ("Spreadsheet on Being Human in the Age of Knowledge Work") will be optional instead of required. However, it is strongly recommended that you try doing it on your own because the assignment aids in the completion of the upcoming, last essay assignment in the course. (See the instructions for Essay 3 on the Assignments page. |
Assignment due by email to your TA by 11:29 pm, Pacific Daylight Time, on May 20: Spreadsheet on Being Human in the Age of Knowledge Work
Class 24 (F., May 22) — (Continued)
- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984), finish the novel. (Print book)
-- Conclusion of professor's lecture on the novel.
Week 9
[M., May 25 — No Lecture (Memorial Day Campus Holiday)]
4. Processing Literature
Information's Impact on the Way We Study Literature
Class 25 (W., May 27) — What is Text in the Digital Age?
- William Warner, Kimberly Knight, and UCSB Transliteracies History of Reading Group, "In the Beginning was the Word: A Visualization of the Page as Interface" (View the original Flash animation for the best interactive access, or view the MP4 video version (or download the AVI or WMV video versions). On the original Flash page, click "Enter" and wait as the animation starts)
- Yin Liu, "Ways of Reading, Models for Text, and the Usefulness of Dead People" [PDF or HTML] (2013)
- Michael Witmore, "Text: A Massively Addressable Object" (2013)
- Wikipedia, "Markup Language" (read just for the main concepts, not the details)
- Alan Liu, "Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse" (2004) (read only pp. 49-57)
Assignment due by email to your TA by 11:29 pm, Pacific Daylight Time, May 27: Essay 3 on Being Human in the Age of Knowledge Work
Class 26 (F., May 29) — Text Analysis and Literature
Week 10
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If the COLA strike by TAs is still continuing at this time in the quarter, this assignment ("Text Analysis Exercise & Short Commentary") will be optional instead of required. |
Assignment due by email to your TA 24 hours in advance of section this last week of course: Text Analysis Exercise & Short Commentary
Class 27 (M., June 1) — Topic Modeling and Literature
Class 28 (W, June 3) — Social Network Analysis and Literature
Class 29 (F., June 5) — Conclusion: What Is Literature For in the Information Age? / What Is Information For in Literature?
- The thought-prompts for this concluding lecture are the ideas of "deformance" and "glitch" in the literary/artistic use of information technology.
- Lisa Samuels and Jerome J. McGann, "Deformance and Interpretation" (1999) -- (read only p. 25-30, and also get a sense of the "deformance" experiments in section V, p. 36-45, and the appendix, p. 50-53) [alternate link]
[paywalled; UCSB students have free access through the campus network or from off-campus through the UCSB VPN or Library Proxy server]
- Also available in an unpaginated HTML version (read on;y Sections 1-2 and the first four paragraphs of Section 3, and also get a sense of the "deformance" experiments in section V and the appendix)
- Mark Sample, "Notes Towards a Deformed Humanities" (2012)
- Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um)] (2011) (read pp. 7-32: "Introduction," "Glitch Manifesto," "A Technological Approach to Noise," and "The Perception of Glitch")
See also Menkman's site: http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com
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During the COVID-19 virus situation, the final exam will be taken by students in online form through the GauchoSpace site for the course. The exam is designed to be 50 minutes long, but students will have a 60 minutes between starting the exam and submitting it (to allow for any delays or technical problems in the online test-taking process). The window of time during which students can start the timed, 60-minute exam will open at 8:00 a.m. and close at 8:00 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time on June 10th. (Special time affordances will be established for DSP students.) Watch for course announcements with further details as Professor Liu designs the online exam. |
(W., June 10) — Final Exam
A 60-minute exam to be taken on the course Gauchospace site here. The final exam covers materials in the second half of the syllabus (since the midterm). See description. (No blue books needed for exam.)
Important late-breaking announcement about the final exam, which will be now a "no-fault" exam: see announcement. (The details were also sent to students by email.) Date of announcement: June 3, 2020
Schedule
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