Literature and Literary Study in the Digital Age, Spring 2014 Edition

“Literature and Literary Study in the Digital Age” is in its third incarnation at SUNY Geneseo as ENGL 340 – a brand new course with its own place in the line-up of offerings under Geneseo’s new English major. The course began as HONR 206, Digital Humanities in Spring 2011, and was offered twice as ENGL 390, first as Studies in Literature: Literature in the Digital Age and then as Literature and Literary Study in the Digital Age.

The latest iteration of the course has its home in this space, a group blog for all students and faculty at Geneseo interested in digital humanities. The blog is part of a larger community organized as English @ SUNY Geneseo, a community powered by the open-source blogging platform WordPress and the open-source plugin Commons In A Box.

If you’re a student in the course, this is where you’ll be blogging this semester, following guidelines you’ll find on the page How to Blog Here. If you’re not a student in the course but you’ve joined the group, please join the conversation and follow the same guidelines.

This year the course coincides with the rollout of two projects at Digital Thoreau, a collaboration among SUNY Geneseo, the Thoreau Society, and The Thoreau Institute at the Walden Woods Project. The two projects are Walden: A Fluid Text Edition and The Readers’ Thoreau. Students in previous iterations of the course have contributed to both projects, and this year’s group will use the projects as resources and carry them further, while also continuing work at Digital Thoreau’s third project, The Days of Walter Harding, Thoreau Scholar.

I’m posting here from San Marino, California, where I’ve just spent the past two days in the Huntington Library with two Thoreau scholars who’ve been instrumental to Digital Thoreau and to the development of this course: Ron Clapper and Beth Witherell. We’ve been looking together at the HM 924, the manuscript of Walden. More on that to come.