In this course, students will be both reading about and authoring multimedia texts to contribute to a Digital Humanities project called the Nashville Shakespeare Festival digital performance archive. Students will work to cultivate digital literacies by critically analyzing and composing within a variety of multimedia genres such as digital stories, web texts, videos, digital archives, etc. In addition to learning industry-standard publication and design software, students will work with many modes of texts to produce a variety of products that involve many different media. Students will investigate the process and the rhetorical consequences of authoring in these digital environments— from conception to publication to distribution.

Course Objectives

1. Demonstrate an understanding of digital literacy concepts such as modality, design, hyper-text, remediation, etc., through discussion, analysis, and composition.

2. Demonstrate the ability to design and compose a variety of multimedia products (3) for a variety of audiences.

3. Demonstrate collaborative skills through collaborative projects and presentations.

4. Engage critical scholarship and popular opinion on the role of digital texts through a series of critical blog posts.

5. Develop sophisticated rhetorical skills, with particular emphasis on written and oral language, including recognizing and evaluating visual images and other forms of non-language-based communication and effective use of technology.