Clinamen

Photo Credit: “the infrastructure” by haribote

Recently, I mentioned to some folks on twitter that I was putting together a graduate seminar for next semester, and those same folks seemed interested in a bit of crowdsourced syllabus design.

So, I’m posting a draft of a brief course description along with a list of possible readings.  If you’re interested, please drop me a comment and let me know what you think. I’m open to suggestions.

New Media Interfaces and Infrastructures

Recent New Media scholarship is pushing beyond the study of texts online and attempting to study the systems, infrastructures, codes, and platforms that produce those texts. By examining and tinkering with the interfaces and infrastructures of new media, scholars across various disciplines and subdisciplines are looking to develop new rhetorics for new media and new research methods. In this course, we will examine and enter this conversation about new media’s interfaces and infrastructures. The class will share reading notes and the results of their research in a wiki-based “Interfaces and Infrastructures” research database. Students will also write a conference paper, geared toward a particular conference.

Final projects for this course could take many forms. A few examples (this list is not exhaustive): a traditional seminar paper, a grant proposal, a dissertation prospectus draft, the design of a new media interface or infrastructure. Students will work with the professor to develop a project that can aid in the student’s career trajectory.

Possible Readings

Foundations
Lanham, The Electronic Word (selections)
Manovich, The Language of New Media
Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
Ulmer, Heuretics (not sure if this fits…but would love to include it)
Ronell, Part I of the UberReader, “The Call of Technology”
Bolter and Grusin, Remediation
Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer

Rhetoric and Composition
Welch, Electric Rhetoric
Rice, The Rhetoric of Cool
Brooke, Lingua Fracta
Reid, The Two Virtuals

Platform Studies/Software Studies
Bogost and Montfort, Racing the Beam
Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms
Wardrip-Fruin, Expressive Processing
Harpold, Ex-Foliations

Other possibilities: Banks’ Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, Matthew Fuller’s Media Ecologies, Mark Hansen’s Bodies in Code, Thierry Bardini’s Bootstrapping, Alexander Galloway’s The Exploit, Siegfried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media, McLuhan (and many more…)

Note: I am considering pairing each text with a primary source. For instance, Harpold discusses Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush, and I could pair their writings with Harpold’s.