Zach Whalen

Today is Monday, and I've just returned from a weekend in Florida where I participated in Futures of Digital Studies, the 5th Annual Digital Assembly Conference. This was a great weekend, not only because I got to be back in Gainesville, but because the conference itself was of exceptional quality, thanks to there being lots of smart people in attendance, and thanks to some hard work from the organizers, Mauro Carassai, Patrick Lemieux, Stephanie Boluk, Elise Takehana, and many others. I know how hard it can be to run a conference like this, on the kind of budget the Digital Assembly works with. (I was an organizer for the first two DA conferences, back when we were the Game Studies Group.)

I definitely detected some themes emerging throughout the various panels, but I'm still trying to decide what it all means. I'm working on a report for Gameology, wherein I'll try to sum it all up.

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With this blog entry, I announce a new project, a new (for me) undertaking in digital scholarship and professional development. In short, I have created a website, www.thevideogametext.com, where I will be publishing my dissertation in serial form. I'm doing this to put my work in front of a wider audience and, hopefully, attract the interest of a publisher as I seek to to turn this into a monograph. In other words, this project is also a book proposal, and even if it never turns into a "real" book, or even something book-shaped, I'm confident that the process will have its own merits. The website also contains a blog where I plan to reflect on the whole project, since to me, the process of developing something like this is often more valuable or interesting than the product.

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In this Spring 2010 seminar, students will explore the concept of code as both a figure in and function of postmodern literature. The texts we examine in the course of this intensive study will either treat code thematically or figuratively, or they will literally involve the reader in decoding content. Taken together, the texts in this class will reside within the realm of the literary postmodern, broadly considered. Readings will also include relevant critical theory that informs our study.

The major project of the seminar will be a long paper. Students will also be expected to blog and lead class discussion on selected readings or topics.

NOTE: Students will, in the progress of this seminar, encounter and write simple computer programming. This, however, is not something to be feared. Moreover, no prior experience in programming will be expected, and students with prior experience will have no advantage over those with none. Above all, this is a seminar in literature, not computer science.
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This course is about media and it is about writing. The operative preposition through comprises the key, two-fold premise of this seminar: that new media technologies offer new literacies and that these literacies depend to some extent on using media technology to communicate effectively. In this advanced writing course, students will balance theory with practice, and the successful student will leave with technical, working knowledge of some New Media technology. She will also be familiar with what it means to think critically with and through these technologies. In this case, the final output of the seminar will be a portfolio-style website – built on the UMWBlogs platform – around which students will build their digital identities.

Objectives

• Gain practical experience in new media technology, including web design, image manipulation and video
• Use effective design principles in service of writing to best take advantage of the affordances of various media
• Make use of “Web 2.0” technology to craft a digital identity

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For the Spring 2010 semester, I will once again be teaching a Graphic Novel course, and I'm very much looking forward to it. What follows is my general course description and list of texts. I thought long and hard about which comics to use, and although I ended up favoring a more inclusive approach than the last time I taught it, there were still several I decided to leave out. I also regret that the text list lacks an overarching thematic unity, but I hope that the process of ferreting out and mapping overarching themes will be a productive aspect of the class as we move through each of them.

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ENGL 375TT: The Graphic Novel

MWF 11:00 - 11:50, Combs 004

In this class, we’re going to study visual storytelling as it is accomplished through the combination of images and text. The graphic novel will be the primary genre under consideration, but other specific forms (comics, comic strips, webcomics, etc.) will be examined as well. Indeed, the term “graphic novel” will be interrogated for its cultural significance and relevance to specific works, especially in light of the fact that creators of these works often eschew the term. Primary readings will include the works listed below, and these will be supplemented by relevant literary theory and comics-specific criticism and theory. This may include work by such authors as Donald Ault, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Thierry Groensteen, Jan Baetens, Will Eisner, and Scott McCloud. The goal of our study will be to understand the formal structures of comics in the context of a long history of medial shifts. Accordingly, the question we will attempt to answer by the end of the semester is: What is the future of comics in and through New Media?

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I have recently learned that I will be teaching a senior seminar in the Spring 2010 semester, and I'm using this blog entry to think through an idea I have. If I get a little feedback, that would be excellent as well.

The senior seminar is an important capstone for the English Major experience. The seminar I took as an undergrad confirmed my desire to go to graduate school and pursue the career I now find myself in. So when I think about what would be valuable in a seminar now, I look back on that one and recognize the responsibility that I now have.

I need a topic and/or focus that meets as many of the following criteria as possible:

1. It is an interesting topic. A topic, that is, that I will enjoy learning about, and a topic that will attract motivated students to enroll.

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Recently, Mark Sample posted a blog entry about making his Zotero library public, in which he outlined a nifty way to use Yahoo Pipes to streamline Zotero's RSS output and place it in a block on his website. This is a great idea, and from the number of "Recently Zoteroed" blocks I've seen cropping up lately, it's pretty clear that others agree as well. Not only does it make sense to put our research bibliographies in public (both for one's own convenience as well as those interested in what one is working on), Mark's blog offers a great how-to for those interested in seeing what Pipes can do.

I've jumped on the bandwagon too, and you can see the results in my "Zotero" block at the bottom right of this page. I took a different approach, however, and all of the aggregating and filtering is handled through Drupal, with no need for a third party between Zotero and my website. I thought this was a good chance to show the power that Drupal puts in the hands of its users. Whenever I talk (excitedly) in public about what I'm doing with Drupal, I get the sense that some of my audience is thinking, "Well, that's great for you, but I don't have time to figure out how to do all that." Building a "Recently Zoteroed" block using Drupal is pretty easy, though, and it's a good demonstration of what to do with one of Drupal's most impressive modules, Views. In the remainder of this blog entry, I'll explain how to build your own Zotero block using Views. This is somewhat lengthy, but I've tried to be very detailed in all of the steps involved. If you're already familiar with Views, you can probably just skim it and get the main ideas.

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I'm currently in the process of setting up Drupal sites for my classes, and I've run into a dilemma. Should I use a wysiwyg editor or not? I personally don't care for them, but would students feel more comfortable composing blog entries in an environment that looks a bit more like a word processor?

In the past, I've argued that a plain text editor really leaves more control in the hands of the author, and control is what it's all about. When a student wants to emphasize text in a blog entry, the path through learning how to properly write an <em> tag pulls them through a thought process that encourage reflection on why and how some text is emphasized. It also gives the student a glimpse under the hood, which -- in a day when HTML skills are increasingly less a gateway to web literacy -- starts to reveal the layers of software and platform underlying the Internet Explorer / Facebook concept of the web that might otherwise be the default.

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With this blog entry, I launch a new version of zachwhalen.net, switching from my old, SHTML-powered site (using a template technique I was quite fond of) to a shiny new Drupal site. That in itself probably doesn't seem very significant, since I use Drupal for everything, but with this change, all of the sites I've built or otherwise keep an eye on are running some kind of blog engine or CMS. I confess a feeling of loss at the notion no longer starting a site build with a text editor.

This shift is also something I'm trying to come to terms with in my teaching as well. The concept of what constitutes New Media writing, for example, is one that necessarily changes, and as I start designing a writing intensive New Media course for next spring, I've decided, finally, to leave out my standard unit on crafting web pages "by hand." So will I replace that unit with one on building sites out of Drupal? Perhaps.

For now, though, I want to inaugurate this space by reflecting on why this space exists as it now does and what I hope to accomplish with it.

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