ENG-377 Writing for Digital Media
John Theibault, Director of the South Jersey Center for Digital Humanities, defines this burgeoning field as an umbrella concept bringing together all of the different ways in which the computer, and especially the internet, have transformed humanities work. It includes using computer methods to mark and analyze analog humanities products, adapting the distinctive features of the World Wide Web for the production and presentation of humanities research, and bringing humanities methods to the evaluation of the entirely new genres of expression made possible by computers. Writing for Digital Media will focus on the latter two of these priorities: using digital tools for creative and communicative purposes, and understanding the rhetorical implications of writing in digital formats and spaces. Certainly, we can observe how traditional, analog forms of writing have been adapted for digital spaces in the proliferation of online magazines, newspapers, and literary journals, but digital technologies have also invented new genres of writing that English majors and other CAS students will find worthwhile to study alongside traditional fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry genres such as blogs, wikis, GIFS, text visualizations, social media narratives, crowdsourced documents, Twitter essays, interactive maps and calendars, and many more. These new genres can satisfy creative urges to use intermedia, organize information into user-friendly presentations, such as infographics, websites, and public-access archives, and communicate information about a company, nonprofit organization, product, initiative, or event.