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Course info

Fall 2023 // TR 3:15-4:45pm // Leyburn 109

The course website is a living document. It will change regularly to reflect the needs of the course.

Contact#

Mackenzie Brooks // Associate Professor & Digital Humanities Librarian // (she/her/hers)

brooksm@wlu.edu // 540-458-8659 // Leyburn 218

Office hours: Mondays 10a-12pm, Thursdays 2-3pm, or by appointment. Please don't hesitate to schedule a meeting with me! I have a lot of meetings in my work life and can't always honor office hours. I'm usually on campus five days a week and happy to meet outside of office hours (but still between 9am-5pm.)

Course description#

Can we trust text? What happens on the journey from handwritten manuscript to your phone screen? Does the meaning change when the format changes? How do the hands of editors, publishers, printers alter a work? When we can search millions of books in an instant, how do we find nuance in the materiality of text? This course explores the definitions, purposes, and uses of scholarly editions of literary and historic texts in the digital age. Using material from Leyburn Library's Special Collections and Archives, we will work together to build our own digital edition. Along the way, students will learn foundational tech skills for digital publishing.

Course objectives#

Students will:

  • Comprehend the definition, purpose, value, and uses of scholarly editions.
  • Acquire foundational skills in digital publishing, including HTML, CSS, TEI, static site generation, and GitHub.
  • Work collaboratively to build our own digital edition website.
  • Develop skills in research with archival/primary and secondary sources.

DCI Learning Outcomes#

  • Develop critical capacities for analyzing the role of technology and digital media in contemporary culture, and apply those capacities to a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary inquiries.
  • Develop the technical skills necessary for academic and professional success, with an emphasis on online communication and information.
  • Demonstrate the ability to communicate across different media and to both academic and general audiences.
  • Engage in collaborative, interdisciplinary, project-based learning.
  • Develop digital projects that contribute to the scholarly conversation in the student's field of study and demonstrate an awareness of the technological and critical needs of the discipline.
  • Develop an online professional identity and a portfolio of work in the minor.

Learn more about the DCI minor on our website.

Required texts#

All readings are available freely online or through Leyburn Library’s subscriptions.

License#

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Book icon by Gung Yoga from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)