In this exploratory English course, I produced an e-portfolio full of smaller digital arts and humanities projects, including exercises in paleography (the study of ancient writing) and hypertext (text that links to other text or information). These projects required adjusting academic work to fit an online format better (both physically with words and images and in terms of the language used).
The main project was my digital edition, which synthesizes and compares a few different editions of David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” in different mediums. The digital edition raises important questions about Wallace’s intentions and audience, as well as his life, especially following his death by suicide in 2008. This project introduced me to the advantages of digital editions as a new kind of digital text, and throughout the class I reflected on how the materiality of textual materials impacts their usage and interpretation.
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