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.[1] Again, that’ll last as long as my engagement does. I’m certainly getting better.
note
- ↑ I did look at the actual .ai domain, but it’s pricy for some reason. A subdomain will have to do.