Electronic Texts: Proposed Course
 

RATIONALE & GOALS

The course explores electronic texts: their development, their contexts, their use as scholarly resources, and the technology used to create them.

1. Electronic text technologies impact how we read, write, study and think about texts. But technology is neither transparent, nor all-powerful.
   
   
   • Students judge that impact through critical reading and discussion of the history and contexts of electronic texts.
     
     
2. Electronic text technologies can assist or impede the scholarly process.
   
   
   • Students learn to apply appropriate electronic text technologies to a variety of scholarly endeavors: communication, research, text analysis, and creation.
     
     
3. Electronic text technologies are being used to create useful scholarly resources and unuseable digital junk heaps.
   
   
   • Students learn which technologies conform to current best practices, which are likely to remain viable, and then create a digital resource that can be used by other scholars.
     
     
4. The use of electronic text technologies in publishing, archival systems, digital archives, and the creation of new scholarly work continues to grow. These technologies shape and will continue to shape scholarly and professional life.
   
   
   • Students will be prepared to participate in the scholarly work of the immediate and continuing future. They will be discerning users, creators of scholarly resources and perhaps creators of new electronic text technologies.
     
     
5. "If it's not online it doesn't exist." What is chosen to be digitized? Are those choices made based on a sense of what's important now or on what may be important in the future? Does digitization ensure our heritage or destroy it? Does the way in which an item is digitized effect its archivability?
   
   
   • Through exploration of current digital heritage projects and through the selection and creation of their own projects, students will gain an understanding of the complexities of digitizing our cultural heritage.
     
     
6. Electronic text technologies are created by specific people for specific purposes. According to Nancy Kaplan "the shapes of our tools . . .powerfully affect who can speak, what they can say, and to whom." In order to shape the tools, we must "learn a new literacy--the skills and knowledge required to understand the design of machines and software if not the skills and knowledge required to do the designing ourselves."
   
   
   • Students use a variety of electronic text technologies to learn how these tools shape what they can do.

Hope.Greenberg@uvm.edu, 15 April 1999, updated 1 Feb 2000