Cutting and pasting the past

Drawing on her book, Cut/Copy/Paste, Whitney Trettien reflects on the history of radical bookwork and what it can teach us about digital publishing today

Archaeology of text-generating mechanisms

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Through an archaeology of text-generating mechanisms, the present work excavates the deep history of reading and writing as material, combinatory practices. On the one hand, by positing the physical manipulation of language as a form of reading and writing, this archaeology answers Roger Chartier's call for book historians to "take on the task of retracing forgotten gestures and habits" that do not fit "the genealogy of our own contemporary manner of reading," a call echoed in much recent work on the "use" of early modem books. It thus challenges our assumptions about how readers and writers of the past made meaning from printed texts and, more broadly, the expressive potentials of the printed book itself. Yet this archaeology of ars combinatoria, the art of combination, also presents a imaginative challenge to historians of the book. For if we accept physically cutting paper or spinning a volvelle as a readerly and writerly act, then we must also erase the boundaries we have drawn between "the book" as a material form and "the digital" as an epistemology, reconsidering the various literacies each facilitates or forecloses. In keeping with the spirit of media archaeology, which seeks to defamiliarize the past, the present work on text-generating mechanisms exists as a web-based text-generating mechanism. On the one hand, this medium allows me to present a comparative history without compromising specificity or reducing the complexity of one moment to a mere reflection of another; yet it still strives for thematic cohesion by using our digital present quite literally as a map for exploring programmatic epistemologies in our past. It lives on the web at: http://www.whitneyannetrettien.com/thesis/ Since MIT Libraries requires a paper copy of a thesis, all HTML pages and code used to produce this thesis are copied in the space below.by Whitney Anne Trettien.S.M

The Horizon of The Publishable in/as Open Access:From Poethics to Praxis

This pamphlet explores ways in which to engage scholars to further elaborate the poethics of their scholarship. Following Joan Retallack, who has written extensively about the responsibility that comes with formulating and performing a poetics, which she has captured in her concept of poethics (with an added h), this pamphlet examines what connects the 'doing' of scholarship with the ethical components of research. Here, in order to remain ethical we are not able to determine in advance what being ethical would look like, yet, at the same time, ethical decisions need to be made and are being made as part of our publishing practices: where we publish and with whom, in an open way or not, in what form and shape and in which formats. Should we then consider the poethics of scholarship as a poetics of/as change, or as Retallack calls it, a poetics of the swerve (clinamen), which continuously unsettles our familiar notions? This pamphlet considers how, along with discussions about the contents of our scholarship, and about the different methodologies, theories and politics that we use to give meaning and structure to our research, we should have similar deliberations about the way we do research. This involves paying more attention to the crafting of our own aesthetics and poetics as scholars, including a focus on the medial forms, the formats, and the graphic spaces in and through which we communicate and perform scholarship (and the discourses that surround these), as well as the structures and institutions that shape and determine our scholarly practices

Short-Circuiting the Hardware of History

Keynote talk. Digital Humanities Forum: Return to the Material. University of Kansas. September 12, 2013: http://idrh.ku.edu/dhforum2013 whitney trettien is a PhD Candidate in English at Duke University.The past is, as Wolfgang Ernst has provocatively written, the “artifactual hardware, so to speak, upon which historical discourse operates like a form of software.” Taking up the implications of Ernst’s statement, this talk explores how tinkering with the material weight of history, its hardware, through the creative/critical use of digital media has the power to update the software of our discourse. By deliberately engaging the charged differences of electronic media — their material strangeness in relation to historical artifacts — tactical methods of creative deformation and critical making have the power to short-circuit scholarly conventions, forcing current methods of reading, writing and communicating to run along new paths

"Digital Editing and Curation" (Spring 2016) graduate seminar syllabus

The attached syllabus was written for my graduate seminar "Digital Editing and Curation," taught to 8 PhD students/candidates at UNC Chapel Hill in Spring 2016. The course description is as follows: "This course introduces students to book history and scholarly editing through the frameworks of media studies and digital humanities. In this course, we will: • learn basic bibliography; • study literary texts as material documents, examining the relationship between form and meaning; • trace the development of textual studies; • challenge our expectations of both print and digital media; • critically analyze a variety of digital humanities projects; • explore remediation and other key concepts in media studies; • and, of course, edit and curate literary texts! Class sessions will consist of discussions of the assigned readings, collaborative analysis of sample projects, and workshops on various tools and technologies used to remediate literary texts in digital spaces.

Renaissance Media syllabus (ENGL 281, Spring 2016)

The attached syllabus was written for my undergraduate seminar “Renaissance Media” (ENGL 281) taught Spring 2016 at UNC Chapel Hill. The learning objectives for the course were as follows: "During this course, students will: * learn the basic history and culture of media technologies in England during the early modern period (roughly 1500-1700); * use this historical knowledge to interpret a wide array of non- and para-canonical literary texts; * understand the Renaissance as a moment of media in transition; * relate contemporaneous responses to that transition to our own moment of technological upheaval; * practice close reading of both texts and their material forms; * practice communicating ideas and arguments across a variety of modes, media, and platforms; * and gain a deeply historicized appreciation for literature as always embedded in and produced by a technological milieu in which not only authors, but communities of readers, designers, publishers, and patrons collaboratively produce meaning.

Digital Narratives syllabus (undergrad media writing course)

The attached syllabus was written for my upper-level undergraduate seminar "Digital Narratives," taught Spring 2013 at Duke University. Here is an excerpt from the course description: "This course considers what it means to tell stories in an age of digital media. We’ll begin by writing a traditional short story (fiction or creative non-fiction), focusing on plot and structure. We’ll then experiment with “translating” this narrative into a variety of new media forms. How does your story change when told as an interactive fiction? as a video game? as a hypertext novel? or on different platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook or Second Life? With each “translation,” we’ll read relevant texts on narratology and media theory as a way of giving us a shared vocabulary for discussing these new genres, and we’ll explore some of the best examples of creative writing in them.

Networked and Multimodal Composition syllabus (undergrad course)

The attached syllabus was written for a 100-level undergraduate seminar “Networked and Multimodal Composition,” taught Fall 2015 at UNC Chapel Hill. The course objectives: "This course aims to empower you, the student, with the tools, skills, and critical vocabulary necessary to compose sophisticated and meaningful digital compositions. By the end of this course, you will be able to: • tell stories effectively using text, image, audio, video, physical space, interactive systems, and social media platforms; • discuss and critically analyze digital technologies and their impact on how we communicate ideas; • plan, design, build, and publish your own multimodal projects, from start to finish.

English 149: Networked and Multimodal Composition (Fall 2015)

The attached syllabus was written for my Fall 2015 section of "Networked and Multimodal Composition," a 20-student undergraduate digital writing course aimed at Freshmen and Sophmores (although a few upperclassmen were in the class, too). The description for the course is as follows: "This course aims to empower you, the student, with the tools, skills, and critical vocabulary necessary to compose sophisticated and meaningful digital compositions. By the end of this course, you will be able to: • tell stories effectively using text, image, audio, video, physical space, interactive systems, and social media platforms; • discuss and critically analyze digital technologies and their impact on how we communicate ideas; • plan, design, build, and publish your own multimodal projects, from start to finish.