ENGL 55.23 Analyzing Content: From Tik Toks to Tweets

The internet is awash with new popular cultural forms, from listicles and lolcats to Ted Talks and makeup tutorials. And yet scholars have only just begun to analyze this new digital “content”: what makes it unique, and how it is reshaping our culture. In this course, we’ll look at new forms of popular digital content in detail—reading tweets as closely as if they were poems, or exploring the substance of 100,000 Instagram images. We’ll survey the methods that have been developed, in different disciplines (media theory, art criticism, sociology), for analyzing content in this way, as well as those that have yet to be attempted (questions that haven’t been asked; material that hasn’t been addressed). To put theory into practice, students will develop 10-12 page research projects on popular digital artifacts of their choosing. They will also be introduced to computational methods of analyzing content, and have the opportunity to pursue these methods further.

Distributive and/or World Culture

Dist:LIT

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