Week 2

This is our first week of officially using the course blog.  In one of the posts this week, I’d like you to formulate some questions you’re interested in addressing in our course.  These could be related to your own personal experiences, academic interests, an idea sparked by a comment in class from last week, etc.  My hope is that we can use these questions to fuel our discussions and maybe even tweak the course plan a bit.

Remember that you are to publish two posts and four comments by the end of the week (which I define as 5pm Friday).  Future blog directions will be sent by that time each week.

 

Week 3

For this coming week, pay some attention in your blogging to the ways in which you can learn about and with historic, rare books.  Where do you find information on them?  Images of them?  What’s the difference between handling an actual Aldine imprint, for instance, and looking at pictures of it or reading descriptions of it?  This has both affective and intellectual dimensions—the information can change, but so can the feeling.  A larger question hovering over all this is: in an age when we manipulate devices with our hands all day long to do our work, what counts as “hands-on”?

 

Week 4

The coming week will introduce us to a wide range of technologies, from linotype to steam power to cylinder presses to lithography to photo-offset…you get the idea.  To get a little more practice in the “what if” kind of question you’re pursuing for the portfolio essay, I’m asking you this week to consider this question: how might the earlier books we’ve seen (hand-press era, pre-print, incunabula—choose one) have been done differently if some of this later technology had been available?  This could be a matter of design, marketing, manufacturing process, etc.  There’s plenty of information on just about any of these technologies, so find something in our textbook to explore and search around for it.

 

Week 5

(covered by “lab” assignment)

 

Week 6

We begin our work on the legal theory and history of copyright this week, and to get a sense for how big concepts (such as fair use, first sale, and performance rights) are at work in our world today, find information on a current lawsuit, criminal trial, or controversy involving a concept from our readings this week (you can draw on either Goldstein or Vaidhyanathan, or both).  Discuss how you see our reading relating to the specific case you find.

 

Week 9

The theme of this week is e-books: legal, aesthetic, technological, or any other “side” of them is fair game.  One angle might be how e-books redefine the relationship between books and other content industries.

 

Week 10

This week, use your blogging to help build your audio essay.  Try writing a quick version of your essay in a blog post (or two); if you can explain what you want to do in 300 words or less, it’s often easier to expand from a core you’re confident with.  I’ve just activated a plugin that will also allow you to embed an mp3 into a post (it’s not required that you do audio in the blog, but I thought I’d make the option available).  Instructions on how to do that will be coming later today.

 

Week 11

Take something you “wrote” from our plagiarism workshop, copy it into a draft, and build a post around it (it’s ok if the whole thing goes over 300 words).  In the comments, you might see if you can sleuth the sources of specific sentences, offer your own reworkings of a passage, etc.  Time to play with plagiarism!