January 11, 2023

Ready to Go

And we’re off. Welcome to the spring semester of 2023. Since you heard from me last, I have had my face-to-face ENGL 2111 dropped, and I got a fresh new online section. Nevermind I had a brand new syllabus all finished; it’s fine. The good news is that I have a two-day one-campus schedule again; the bad news is I have a lot more students. C’est la via academe. Well, all syllabi are finished and ready-to-go. I’m just not sure that I am ready.

That’s what I’ve been doing for the past five days. I had to design ENGL 4430 from scratch. That’s the third upper-level English course I’ve designed in as many years—not to mention a new section of ENGL 2122 online. I wonder if I’ll get to teach any of those again?

I have something else to prepare for now: something that requires me to think about what an undergraduate program in the Digital Humanities would look like. In addition, I need to come up with a few details about how I would teach a totally hypothetical course called “Introduction to Digital Humanities,” that might be described:

“ Seminar course that explores how digital technologies create new possibilities for knowledge-making in the humanities. Students engage in digital humanities research using a variety of multi-modal methods to explore how technologies can be harnessed to tell stories, connect information, raise awareness, and visualize complex ideas in interactive ways. ”

I did teach a course like this a decade ago. I see I taught a whole section on TEI and XML. Too funny. It would need to be updated, and I think that would be the primary characteristic of a class like this: keeping up with the theories, techniques, and technologies that remediate textuality. Oooo, I kinda like that. Time to begin my review.

                    

When not preparing for this semester, I have been working further with Midjourney, but I ran out of hours. I plan on buying more, but the package I want is $30 a month. That’s a bit steep. I’ll probably do it for a month or two—at least until my interest wanes or something else happens. I made an Instagram account for my creations and decided to also put them on another Ghost install at LucasPix.ai. Again, that’ll last as long as my engagement does. I’m certainly getting better.

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