WRITING in the CLOUDS: Authorship, Curation, and Copyright in Networked Digital Spaces.
21st Century internetworked digital tools are often dependent on the use of high-speed connections to the Internet to construct cloud-based simulacra of the physical drives and other writing spaces that we once understood to lie within our computers. Composers writing on - for example - Google's Chromebooks have little "internal" space to work with. Rather, their work occurs not so much on their laps, or desks, but rather in the server spaces assigned to their particular machines. Given this new technological structure, writers have never been so distant from their own work. Ironically, the work of other writers has never been "closer" than it is to contemporary composers who typically navigate around e-mail, instant messages, and an ever-expanding pool of freely available texts in order to write. Accordingly, this seminar surveys some of the best and most interesting of the very recent scholarship on three interlinked areas that are responding to technological changes in writing technologies - composition, curation, and copyright - in order to better understand how writers are responding to profound shifts in their writing spaces. In keeping with the topic of the class, students will be encouraged to pursue capstone projects that take advantage of the opportunities afforded by internetworked digital tools and composing possibilities.
There is not a bookstore order for this class - instructor encourages the purchase of eBooks, especially in the case of The Routledge Handbook of Digital Rhetoric and Writing to minimize out-of-pocket costs for students in this class