English 791DC - S-Intro/DigitalCulturalStudies

This class will explore the major theoretical concepts and debates that have emerged across the various interdisciplinary fields of digital cultural studies, including the digital humanities and new media studies. The basic question this course will answer is how do we study digital culture, texts, platforms, and communities like Facebook, YouTube comments, video games, or memes and Black Twitter? The varied approaches to writing about "simulations" will serve as our opening theoretical framework for examining digital culture but, as we will quickly discover, conversations about simulation have far reaching applications. For example, N. Katherine Hayles argues that simulations and computation work "simultaneously as means and metaphor in technical and artistic practices," and that both narrative and computer representations function as tools that help us understand the world around us. More skeptically, Shirley Turkle argues that the fact that we now ?see the world through the prism of simulation? prompts us to focus on the times when "simulation demands unhappy compliance." In engaging arguments like this we will ask: Can narratives work as computations or simulations? What is the relationship between the act of reading as "hallucination" and computer simulation? Is narrative interpretation similar to what we experience on our devices - from video games to mobile phones? Does the predominance of the digital, including the recent shifts to a "digital humanities" suggest that we have successfully destroyed and disordered our shared realities, as theorist Jean Baudrillard melancholically predicted? We will analyze different aspects of digital culture as simulations that are related to other key terms and concepts like proceduralism, Big Data, semiotics, representation, post-humanism, and repetition.

Open to Graduate students only.