Syllabus

Course Description
This course is an introduction to writing in electronic environments. I have designed it so that you will be exposed to a number of key threads that I believe are central to understanding and producing artful expression in the Web medium. While we will have a fair amount of reading for this class, our central activity and concern is the production of our own digital creations, because it is only through production and practice that we can best identify the accuracies and exaggerations and insights and delusions of work written by theorists and historians of digital expression.

Here, then, are the key threads we’ll encounter through our work in the class. They are not a progression, but rather a collection that will be present, each to varying degrees, throughout the course:

History: I believe we tend to look at the Web and other technologies (CD-ROMs, Flash Drives, iPods, Bluetooth) as sort of eternally always new. But all of these things share a history, much of which goes back more than 150 years. We’ll be reading various pieces of history, from artistic manifestos to visions of the future to primary technical documents, in order to situate and understand current activities and trends in digital writing and production.

Web Standards: One of the problems we’ll see emerge from our historical reading is that of standards. If you’ve spent even a little time on the Web, you’ll be familiar with Web sites that proclaim something like “This site requires Internet Explorer 6.0.” We’ll look at the so-called “browser wars” that brought this phenomenon about, and the dedicated work within various professional circles to promote standards-based languages and devices. Our production work in the class will be centered on standard uses of the markup language XHTML and CSS. As we move into other types of media applications, like Flash and others based on your interests, we’ll examine ways to keep Web standards in mind.

Extensibility: This thread erupts from the issue of standards. Within the humanities, one of the accusations that is more often blasted than intelligently leveled at digital production and its artifacts is that anything digital is ephemeral and therefore dangerous, since supposedly no one can guarantee that a digital text will be accessible in five or even ten, much less 50 years. We’ll consider whether Web standards and other guiding principles can help us to create digital texts that have a better chance of survival and, in turn, are easier to extend, repurpose, and deploy in digital environments we cannot even conceive of today.

Usability and Accessibility: These terms are often incorrectly conflated, and even more often draw groans from Web designers and developers. We’ll look at how Web standards help us question and move beyond the proclamations of usability gurus like Jakob Nielsen, while promoting better rhetorical success on the Web by reaching broader audiences of different equipment and ability and even achieving better search engine rankings. We’ll be reading from Donald Norman’s Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, which offers important insights along these lines.

Rhetoric: Everything created has a rhetorical dimension. What is rhetoric? My simplest answer is that rhetoric is the use of symbols (language) in human affairs. Artful rhetoric is meant to achieve two things: to change how people think and/or to change how people act. We’ll be considering rhetoric in greater depth and in terms of its history and its important function for standards (& thus technology), extensibility, usability, and accessibility. I think that we will discover that any act of digital production is guided by rhetoric every step of the way, from the earliest concept to pixel-level refinement of a visual design.

A Note to Technophobes
As is hinted at in the course description, we’re going to be doing some heavy-duty work with technology. Regardless of your skill level, though, you will receive the support, guidance, and instruction you need to succeed in the class. It is not required or even important that you be a technical whiz; we’ll all be working at different levels, with the technological goal of the class being only that everyone advances. And as we’ll see, those with limited experience will likely have an easier time learning standards-based methods of Web production. Regardless, email or come see me ASAP if you need help.

Course Goals

• Understand the history, technologies, languages, controversies, culture, converging disciplines, and problems surrounding digital production.
• Learn to function within various aesthetic, rhetorical, and usability/accessibility concerns in multimedia design.
• Use, adapt, and evaluate writing, design, and publishing software and languagesfor specific rhetorical purposes in digital contexts.
• Learn to evaluate and apply effective rhetorical principles of design in digital production.
• Develop multiple and flexible on- and offline work strategies to manage digital projects.
• Learn and apply strategies for collaborating successfully and equitably with peers on various activities and major projects using a variety of communication technologies.

Course Structure
Since we meet twice a week, we’ll generally use Tuesdays as our discussion days and Thursdays as our production days. As we get towards the end of the semester and your final projects, we will probably be spending more time on production. Unlike many courses that rely on technology, I will not be giving long presentations on how to do this or that with a piece of software. Instead, you will use your own projects to guide your learning; my role (and the role of your colleagues) will be to help you solve particular rhetorical, creative, and design problems. For example, I won’t teach you how to fade an image out in Photoshop; rather, you will discover that you want to fade an image out in Photoshop, and we’ll work together on helping you achieve that. In this class, we identify a particular production problem, and then work to solve it; I’ve found that’s the best way to retain techniques for coding and working with software.

Design Book
Good writers, good designers, good artists, good thinkers (in some measure, we’re trying to be all four in this class) all keep some kind of record of their thinking out of a deeply felt need to do so. You should keep a portable, paper journal, as well as a digital one. These can take on any form you like, so long as you’re playing with them to make them useful for yourself. Scribblings, ideas, sketches, snippits, etc. all work good in the paper version; the digital one ought to include photographs you take, images you scan or lift from the Web (with image credits, of course). I will periodically ask to see your storyboards/e-journals, but you should be entering something in them about three times a week (hopefully more).

Del.icio.us Account
Largely an information sharing/digital show-and-tell activity, you will maintain a del.icio.us account for at least the purposes of bookmarking sites and resources that you believe would be of interest to others in Engl 439/539. You’ll tag such sites with “engl439,” and the feed from your “engl439”-tagged sites will be aggregated at our course web site. Because you will (or should!) be looking at a lot of materials on the Web, I expect your account to be active—especially your “engl439” feed. (Hint: a tag like “design-inspiration” for sites you find inspiring can be a nice addition to your del.icio.us account, too.) We will be setting up del.icio.us accounts the first night of class.

Personal Resource Storage
Capture photographs, digital or scanned, that you’ll be able to draw from for class assignments. Shoot textures, people, clouds, garbage. Grab images from the Web (however, images in your final projects must be your own; still, Web-available images are a great source of inspiration). Just be constantly adding to it, and always bring it to class.

Daily Backups
I won’t be checking these, but if you fail to do them and your dog-like hard drive eats your data for lunch, you’ll find yourself SOL. Always, always back up your data: projects, digital sketchbooks—everything you do for this class. Save your work in multiple places, but always be sure to have an optical backup (versus floppies, hard drives, etc. which are magnetic). I’ll give you a handout on a successful scheme for backing up your data; you’d also be wise to see if there is any back-up software on your personal computer to facilitate automated backups—I also have a few software recommendations along those lines, if you’re interested. Computer failure is not a valid excuse for incomplete work, or work not turned in on time. Taking good care of your data is perhaps the first responsibility of digital production. Remember: it’s not a matter of if your disk or computer will fail, but when.

Required Books/Materials
Deke McClelland: Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-One. O’Reilly Media, Inc. 2007
Elizabeth Castro: HTML, XHTML & CSS Quickstart Guide. PeachPit Press. 2007
Donald Norman: Emotional Design. Basic Books. 2005
Robin Williams: The Non-Designers Design and Type Book. 2007

Flash Drive/CD-ROMs

Grading

Project 1 Photoshop Remix 15%
Project 2 Website Redesign (Group) 15%
Project 3 Website Design (Individual) 30%
Exercises In Class, Take Home and Design Book 20%
Participation/Del.icio.us 20%

Attendance and Participation
Because we have so much to discuss and do, your attendance is important. You are allowed to miss three classes; your final grade will be lowered an entire letter for every absence thereafter. Do the math: miss 7 classes, and earn an instant F—even assuming you’re doing A-quality work. I’m not interested in excused versus unexcused absences. Either you’re here, or you’re not.

Regarding participation: Participation counts as 20% of your final grade. In order to earn a solid participation grade, you must come prepared to class by completing all of the readings and project work due on a given day, be an active part of our discussions and studio time, and work cooperatively with your colleagues. But perhaps the most important way you can participate is by asking lots of questions.

Regarding late work: I do not accept late work. Everything in our class has a due date, and I expect material you wish for me to grade to be in my possession at the start of class the day it is due. If it’s 3:01PM and I don’t have your project in my hands on a CD-ROM or a URL in my inbox, you earn an F for that assignment. No exceptions, including technology failures—I’ll refer you to the Daily Backups portion of this document.

Special Needs Statement
According to University policy, students with disabilities must be registered with Adaptive Programs in the Office of the Dean of Students before classroom accommodations can be provided. If you are eligible for academic accommodations because you have a documented disability that will impact your work in this class, please speak with me privately after class or email me as soon as possible to schedule an appointment with me to discuss your needs.

Academic Honesty
The following statement about academic honesty is from the Honor Council website (http://orgs.odu.edu/hc/pages/plagiarism.shtml):

Plagiarism is cited in the University Honor Pledge as a violation of the Student Code of Conduct. Those found in violation are subject to disciplinary action.

An exact definition of plagiarism is found under Section 3.F of the Student Disciplinary Policies and Procedures under the Student Code of Conduct. It reads as follows: “A student will have committed plagiarism if he or she reproduces someone else’s work without acknowledging its source; or if the source is cited which the student has not cited or used (1998). Plagiarism includes submitting a research paper obtained from a commercial research service, the Internet, or from another student as if it were original work; making simple changes to borrowed materials while leaving the organization content, or phraseology intact; or copying material from a source, supplying proper documentation, but leaving out quotation marks (1998). Plagiarism also occurs in a group project if one or more of the members of the group does none of the group’s work and participates in none of the group’s activities but attempts to take credit for the work of the group (1996).”

If you are uncertain about the use of certain material (ideas, text, image, design, code, etc.) in your work, please ask me well before the due date of your project; the consequences for plagiarism are severe. Old Dominion’s policies regarding plagiarism include penalties ranging from failure of an assignment to expulsion from the University. In this class, anyone who plagiarizes automatically fails the course, and I will inform the Office of the Dean of Students of the reason for the failing grade. And trust me: if you plagiarize, you will be caught.

Academic Dishonesty Subtopic: Originality in Image, Design, and Code
In this course, you are encouraged to work with design schemes and images that you find on the Web as you develop a new design. However, I expect that your final design and any images and code you use will be your own. When you do use visual elements or code from other sources, there must be an indication of that somewhere, somehow in your project. We’ll talk about savvy ways to do that. Copyrighted images are, of course, forbidden in your final projects unless you have obtained written permission to use them.
And I would think/hope it goes without saying in this class, but the use of Web page generating sites on the Web or any pre-fab or factory templates (those packaged with software) in any programs you use is strictly forbidden, as is taking someone else’s CSS. We’re after originality in design and organization. Besides, you’re not going to earn an A by blowing my mind with someone else’s layout and design; you’ll earn an A by your own hard work.