Spring 2020 Syllabus

ENGL 340 S20 Information and Schedule, COVID-19 EDITION

This is the revised syllabus for our class effective March 23. You can always find the original syllabus, for comparison, on GitHub.

Our individual and community learning outcomes haven’t changed. Nor have our means of assessment (blog posts, annotations on Walden, journaling, and a final project.) But some readings have been eliminated, and the final project may become an individual rather than a group project.

In comparing this syllabus with the original, please note especially the revisions to the section titled Take care of yourself and to everything after spring break.

Individual learning outcomes

What will you know and be able to do as a result of taking this course? First, because this is a 300-level English course, you’ll improve your

  • ability to read texts in relation to history
  • understanding of how texts are related to social and cultural categories (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, ability), enterprises (e.g. philosophy, science, politics), and institutions (e.g., of religion, of education)
  • understanding of how language as a system and linguistic change over time inform literature as aesthetic object, expressive medium, and social document

In addition, as a result of taking ENGL 340, you should

  • understand, at a basic level, the computational dimension of language and literature
  • understand, at a basic level, some common uses of computation and computational tools in the study of literature
  • feel prepared to use computational methods and tools for literary analysis and interpretation in another literature course
  • know more about how your computer works than you did before

Community learning outcomes

What will we accomplish in this course as a community?

  • Produce new knowledge (new for this community) about literature and literary study in the digital age
  • Share knowledge about literature and literary study in the digital age in accordance with scholarly conventions
  • Discuss and debate ideas about individual literary works and about the nature of literature and literary criticism in ways that respect the diversity of the community
  • Help one another when we’re stuck

Assessment

How will you know if you’ve met the individual outcomes? How will we know if we’ve met the community outcomes?

  • You’ll keep a journal in which you write regularly about what you’re learning in the course
  • You’ll write two blog posts for this website in which you reflect on your learning in this course
  • You’ll contribute to a final project in which you make use of particular computing skills that you acquire in the course

Texts

  • James Gleick, The Information
  • Jeffrey Pomerantz, Metadata
  • Henry D. Thoreau, Walden and Selections from the Journal
  • Assorted short readings

Tools and accounts

Requirements and evaluation

Your final grade in this course will be based on the number of points you earn out of a maximum of 100 points. You’ll earn points for the activities listed below. You must complete all assigned work to pass the course.

  • Blog: You’ll earn up to 30 points for two blog posts (15 points each) in which you reflect on your learning in this course. (Due 2/12 and 4/15.)
  • Blog some more (optional): You can earn up to 5 points for up to 5 additional blog posts over the course of the semester. Posts must be directly relevant to our work in the course. Each post will be evaluated based on relevance, quality of writing, and content. You can post to the blog as often as you like, but you can’t earn points for more than one extra-credit post in any given week of the semester.
  • Journal: You’ll earn up to 20 points for maintaining an online markdown journal in which you write regularly about what you’re learning in the course. (Due 2/19 and 4/13.)
  • Annotate: You’ll earn up to 15 points for 15 annotations that you leave in Walden.
  • Contribute: You’ll earn up to 35 points for a group project to which you contribute, with 15 of those points coming from your personal contribution to the project and a final blog post you’ll write about your work on it.

Do you have a disability?

SUNY Geneseo will make reasonable accommodations for persons with documented physical, emotional or learning disabilities. Accommodations will be made for medical conditions related to pregnancy or parenting. Requests for accommodations including letters or review of existing accommodations should be directed to the Office of Disability Services in Erwin 22 (Ms. Heather Packer, disabilityservices-at-geneseo.edu or 585-245-5112). If you have an accommodation letter, let me know as soon as possible in the semester so we can discuss specific arrangements.

Take care of yourself

It’s hard work being a student! You can improve your chances of success by eating well, getting enough sleep, and making wise choices. If you need help, ask for it. Student Health and Counseling can help you if you’re sick or need psychological or emotional support. A variety of Campus Learning Centers, including the Writing Learning Center, offer academic support services. And then there’s me. Schedule an appointment to consult with me about assignments, to tell me if you’re facing basic obstacles to success such as food insecurity, to continue the conversation about readings and topics in the course, or just to talk. If reading or discussing certain kinds of content in this course might prove traumatic for you, let me know and we’ll work together to figure out a reasonable solution.

COVID-19 Addendum: Everything in the paragraph above is all the more important in our new reality. Your top priority for the remainder of the semester should be to stay healthy and to look after the health of those in your immediate community, whether that’s family or friends. You should know that I’m looking for you to make your best effort with the assignments that remain. If you’re in touch with me in a timely fashion (preferably via Slack, but other means are fine), I’m happy to be flexible about due dates. Our aim for the remainder of the semester is to keep learning. In every piece of assigned work that remains this semester, then, the question you should be asking yourself is, “Am I showing that I’ve learned something?”

Think about others

  • Express yourself honestly but respectfully
  • Practice forbearance when offended by others, even as you exercise your right to explain your reasons for taking offense
  • Consider how the world looks to someone who is not you
  • Do your best to address others as they prefer to be addressed

Schedule

Week 1 | Preliminaries

W 1/22

Activity: Who’s here? And why?

Week 2 | Setting ourselves up

[Skills and tools: plain text editing, markdown]

M 1/27

W 1/29

  • Before class:
    • Read The Information, Chapter 2
    • Read through module on HTML and CSS
  • In class: discussion; markdown editing, journaling, html, the web

Weeks 3-5 | The web

[Skills and tools: HTML, CSS, Git, GitHub]

M 2/3

W 2/5

  • Before class: read The Information, Chapter 3
  • In class: discussion; more with HTML and CSS

M 2/10

  • Before class:
    • Read The Information, Chapter 4
    • Read through this module on using your computer’s command line
    • Follow these instructions to install Git; wait to test till in class
  • In-class: discussion; hands-on with command line and text-editing

W 2/12

  • Before class:
    • Read The Information, Chapter 5
    • Read Walden, “Economy” (paragraphs 1-70)
    • Leave a comment on any passage in Walden that’s relevant to our discussions so far about language/information/technology. Explain how the passage is relevant.
    • Read through this module on Git and GitHub
  • In class: discussion; hands-on with command line and text-editing; pushing to Git
  • Due: first blog post

M 2/17

  • Before class:
    • Read The Information, Chapter 6
    • Read Walden “Economy” (paragraph 71 – end)
    • Leave another comment in “Economy” (71 – end). See instructions above.
  • In class: discussion; collaborating with Git and GitHub

W 2/19

  • Before class:
    • Read Walden “Where I Lived and What I Lived For”
    • Read The Information, Chapter 7
    • Leave a comment on a passage in “Where I Lived” that feels connected to anything in Gleick
  • In class: discussion; more with Git and GitHub
  • Due: Your journal to date

Weeks 6-8 | Analyzing text

[Skills and tools: grep, voyant, python, nltk]

M 2/24

  • Before class:
    • Read The Information, Chapter 8
    • Read N. Katherine Hayles, “How We Read” (in Slack > #assignments)
    • Read Walden, “Reading”
    • Leave a comment on a passage or passages in “Reading.” Use the passage(s) to compare Thoreau’s ideas about reading to those in Hayles and to the way(s) you yourself read.
  • In class: discussion; basics of text analysis; Voyant Tools

W 2/26

  • Before class:
    • Read The Information, Chapter 9
    • Read Walden, “Sounds”
    • Leave a comment on a passage in “Sounds” comparing a sound or sounds Thoreau describes to sounds in your own life. Consider how the sounds in Thoreau’s life and your own are affected by technology.
  • In-class: discussion; command-line text search with grep

M 3/2

  • Before class:
    • Read The Information, Chapter 10
    • Read Walden, “Solitude”
    • Leave a comment on a passage in “Solitude” connecting Thoreau’s ideas to your own experience with being alone or with others. Consider the role that technology plays for both Thoreau and you in shaping the experience of being alone or with others.
    • Read this module on text analysis using NLTK
    • Install Anaconda
  • In-class: discussion, python and nltk

W 3/4

  • Before class:
    • Read The Information, Chapter 11
    • Read Walden,“Visitors”
    • Leave a comment in “Visitors” connecting any passage there with a passage from a previous chapter. How are the ideas or the language in the “Visitors” passage similar to or different from the ideas or language in the previous one?
  • In class: discussion, python and nltk

M 3/9

  • Before class:
    • Read The Information, Chapter 12
    • Read Walden,“The Bean-Field”
    • Leave a comment on anything in “The Bean-Field” that makes you feel joy, wonder, confusion, or anger. Explain your reaction.
  • In class: discussion, python and nltk

W 3/11

  • Before class:
    • Read The Information, Chapter 13
    • Read Walden, “The Village”
    • Leave a comment on any passage in “The Village” that seems to you relevant to contemporary politics. Explain the connection you see.
  • In class: discussion, python and nltk

 

Spring Break: M 3/16-F 3/20

Week 9 | Soft restart

Office hours, journaling

I’ll hold drop-in office hours Monday and Wednesday 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm. I’ll use Zoom for this rather than Google Hangouts because Zoom will do better at accommodating a large meeting. Watch for a link to come your way in Slack and via Google Calendar. I’ll answer any questions you have about how we’re going to preserve learning in our class for the remainder of the semester and help you troubleshoot any computer issues you may be having.

You should continue journaling and pushing your journal files to GitHub — twice a week — this week and throughout the remainder of the semester. These files, as always, needn’t have a lot in them. They should, at a minimum, chronicle the things you’re learning in the course.

Other assignments for the week

  • Read The Information, Chapter 14 – Epilogue
  • Read Walden, “The Ponds” through “Winter Animals.”
  • By Thursday at 11:59 p.m.:
    • Leave a comment on any passage in these chapters of Walden that has to do with time.
    • Leave a comment on any passage in these chapters that connects with your experience in our current unprecedented circumstances.

Weeks 10-12 | Metareading

See the modules I’ve built in Canvas (when published). The modules cover topics that we would have covered differently in our face-to-face meetings. Same content, new approach. No added assignments. Some assignments from the original syllabus have been eliminated to simplify your life. You’ll find the specific assignments and due dates in the modules themselves.

In brief, the modules cover:

  • “Metareading” as a type of reading that we should consider alongside “close reading,” “hyperreading,” and “machine reading” (aka “distant reading”)
  • The concept of a “fluid text”
  • Walden as a fluid text
  • TimelineJS as a tool for metareading a fluid text
  • TEI/XML as a tool for metareading a fluid text
  • The concept of “metadata”

Principal readings contained in these modules:

Due by April 13: Your journal to date
Due by April 15: Your second blog post

During this period I’ll continue to hold drop-in office hours MW 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm and to remain available by appointment. However, if not many people drop in for office hours, we’ll rely entirely on appointments.

Weeks 13-15 | Projects

See the module I’ve built in Canvas (when published). During these three weeks, you’ll create a timeline using TimelineJS that explains your view of what is happening in some change or set of changes Thoreau made to Wadlen as he drafted the work.

You’ll also pick a single manuscript page that has changes on it and encode these changes in XML/TEI.

On our original syllabus, these were to be group projects. Working in groups may be difficult in our new circumstances, so it’s possible these will become individual projects. We have some time to negotiate this.

During this period I’ll continue to hold drop-in office hours MW 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm and to remain available by appointment. However, if not many people drop in for office hours, we’ll rely entirely on appointments.

Your timeline, XML/TEI file, and blog post discussing your project are due on Wednesday, May 6.