Welcome to ENGL 3844 – Writing & Digital Media! In this course, I introduce fundamental practices and emerging theories of writing with and for digital media. We will learn basic authoring in web-development syntaxes, critical interpretation of online sources, social media management, and topics of computational abstraction for writers. We will cover and practice such items through the following projects:

1. Collecting and organizing data about a personal digital media practice,
2. Designing a data visualization from the data,
3. Researching and composing a video that explains a complex issue about broader internet and web services, and
4. Designing and writing a website that reviews and integrates the media that you created throughout the course.

Course Intensity

This course is production-heavy, and it demands that you read the required texts and practice the assigned skills. Some weeks may prove lighter, while others more intensive. The beginning pace of the course is deliberatly slower to accomodate student drops and adds, as well as the conceptual content that we review in the first few weeks. From there, the pace quickens. Notably, near the end of the semester, the quick pace is sustained through the introduction of the website project for the remaining weeks of the course. This project is your final, and it requires you to devote time and energy upfront and throughout the project, so you can understand how to design and write your website. I note this nature of the course at the start of the semester to help you consider what time you can commit, so you can make an informed descision about your agreement to follow the schedule successfully.

Objectives

By the end of this course, you will have completed the following objectives:

• Design and produce digital media: A functional data set about your media habits, a data visualization from that data, and a video that integrates audio, images, and clips to explain a complex issue about digital data.
• Inventory digital media technologies and appraise their influence and import over time.
• Recognize, use, and cite copyleft resources to produce digital media.
• Recognize and use basic computational authoring syntaxes of .html & .css. Specifically, you will learn about the different types of HTML elements, different types of CSS selection skills, and how to create a simple responsive grid layout.
• Develop a critical awareness about writing as digital media and shaped by digital media. Specifically, you will learn how digital data are written and collected about your media practices online for a variety of purposes and audiences.