English 241 First Writing Assignment: Digital Texts and Archives
There is no minimum page length. I would prefer that your writing would take up no more than five pages when printed, though you may include features that would make it more sensible to read it as a digital text. I want to emphasize concentrated, sophisticated thinking in your writing, rather than length or sheer accumulation of ideas. The topics below are intended to simulate, not limit, your creative engagement with the issues we have been discussing. You may well find that you have more to say than you can fit into five (virtual) pages. Remember that you can return to these topics in the final research projects, though I hope most of you will want to work with books from Goucher's Special Collections. Remember to document your use of both primary and secondary sources using MLA in-text citations and a properly formatted Works Cited section.
1) Digital texts have changed a great deal since the earliest ASCII messages and text files. Pick one of the following innovations and explore how its use in modern digital texts has changed writers' and readers' use of the texts: variable fonts with true italics and bold-face; embedded digital images; embedded sound files; embedded full-motion video. Take care to consider the innovation's positive and negative potentials. When were these innovations introduced and by whom? (Usually this will be a corporate "whom.") What did experts and critics at the time think would result, and what might they think now?
2) The production of texts has increased so much since the widespread international adoption of the Internet that scholars of the future will have an enormous problem finding, reading, and understanding the provenance of it all. What might contemporary authors, publishers, libraries, and other organizations and persons do to enable our era's texts to be used by future generations. You can take for granted that the physical preservation and access problems described by Joel Rothenberg will be solved at some point in the future.
3) Children growing up today will relate differently to literacy than you do, especially as they encounter fewer and fewer books, and do more of their reading and writing online, including texting using cell-phone-like devices with small screens and limited keyboard input capacity. Using your own younger siblings, and your network of friends with younger siblings, interview some of these children and gather information about how they learned to read and write, how they typically use their literacy skills today, and what they expect to be using literacy for in the future. Unless you have reasons you can clear with me before completing the paper for not doing so, I would expect you to gather information from at least five informants for a short exploratory paper like this.
4) People older than you are typically have much less homogenous experiences of entering into the world of digital texts and archives. Some still refuse to use certain kinds of digital text (e.g., texting), and some make surprisingly limited use of this technology. Using your parents, Goucher faculty (other than me!), and other informants over thirty, gather information about how and when they were introduced to "word processing" documents, Internet access, online library catalogs, and other technologies now considered essential to scholarly information literacy. Unless you have reasons you can clear with me before completing the paper for not doing so, I would expect you to gather information from at least five informants for a short exploratory paper like this.
5) Research the available archives of digital text, sound, and images that are available to scholars on a specific issue or topic relevant to current or future scholarly work in your major. Narrow your focus sufficiently to enable you to make qualitative judgments about the relative value of these digital archives. Evaulate what is stored there in terms of its availability in other formats (e.g., can you get it in print, DVD, etc.?) as well as the appropriateness of digital archiving to this particular kind of information. Evaluate the quality of its search interface, taking care to make sure you have thoroughly explored and tested it. The resulting document would take the form of a "finding aid" for scholars doing work on that issue or topic, including URLs of the sites you are evaluating. Unless you have reasons you can clear with me before completing the paper for not doing so, I would expect you to gather information from at least three sites of significant complexity and size. One some topics, single sites exist that would take far more than five (virtual) pages to analyze--we can negotiate ways to focus such research.
6) How will the wide-spread dissemination of digital texts affect the concept of "copyright" in coming years? Consult recent scholarly discussions of copyright and its alternatives. What consequences might result from the disappearance of textual copyright, in particular. Consider different genres of texts that are currently produced and distributed under copyright controls. Which genres of text production might increase in quantity, quality, and/or importance as a result of the end of enforceable copyright protection, and which genres might decrease in quality, quality, and/or importance? Use evidence from the recent past of the Internet to support your argument. That is, this is not just an opportunity to speculate wildly. You have to make a plausible case for your thesis.
7) Former innovations in text production and distribution, which we will be exploring in the rest of the semester, tended to imitate the previous modes of text production and distribution for decades or even centuries until readers and writers and text manufacturers realized the full potential of the new innovations. Codex books were not paginated, following the mise-en-page of the scroll, until decades after printing's introduction. The earliest decades of printed book type fonts imitated precisely the complicated Gothic handwriting of fifteenth-century scribes, despite the fact that those manuscript hands were deliberately obscure and difficult to learn to read. Today, digital media routinely are made and used following conventions based on paper text construction, including the notions of the "page" and the "book." Imagine the text of the next technological generation. What substrates might it be found upon (vs. parchment or paper "leaves" or CRT or LCD "screens," and how might future readers operate it (vs. "turning pages," "scrolling," or even "opening" or "closing" the text)? Use evidence from the recent past of the Internet, or other human responses to cultural innovation, to support your argument. That is, this is not just an opportunity to speculate wildly. You have to make a plausible case for your thesis.