Course Offerings
Educating Across Departments and Disciplines in a Digital Age

Humanities education in the 21st century should include focus on digital content and practices. By studying how we use, create and consider digital, students learn to think critically about the tools they use to read, write and communicate. The DH Initiative assembles perspectives and teaches across departments, as the below courses demonstrate. By crossing disciplines, students understand DH is neither a single content area nor method of practice but rather a mode of thinking and engaging with culture.

Spring 2022

ART 348 Three Dimensional Digital Media
Taught by Sam Shpigelman
Design communication utilizing digital media as it relates to three-dimensional objects and spatial environments

EUROP 160 - European Reflections on Science and Technology
Taught by Mathias Schulze
European authors at the intersection of arts, science, and technology. Major innovations and debates across time and place.

GEOG 780 - Knowledge Analytics
Taught by Dr. André Skupin
Spatial analytic techniques from image processing, remote sensing, geographic information systems, cartography or quantitative methods. May be repeated with new content. See Class Schedule for specific content. Maximum credit six units applicable to a master's degree.

HUM 409 - The Future
Taught by April Anson
Conceiving of time and visions for tomorrow in an ever-changing world. Being human in an age of artificial intelligence and cloning. Utopian and dystopian visions. Thinkers, artists, and scientists from past and present contemplate the unknown. Breakthroughs and possibilities.

JMS 200 - Introduction to Contemporary Media
Taught by Noah Arceneaux
Mass media and emerging forms of niche media in the global community. Theories, structures, functions, practices, problems, interrelationships, economics, critical analyses, history, and ethics.

JMS 428 - Digital and Social Media Analytics
Taught by Rebecca Frazee
Measurement standards, principles, and outcomes of digital and social media. Digital data collection methods, data analysis metrics, data reporting, presentation tools. Using analytics to enhance organizational effectiveness.

JMS 472 - Media Tech & Society
Taught by Noah Arceneaux
Relationship between technology and society, and factors that influence the innovation, development, commercialization, and diffusion of media technologies. Exploration of specific qualities of various media forms.

JMS 492 - Creative Uses of Emerging Media
Taught by Nathian Rodriguez
New and often unexpected convergence of media institutions, technology, and content. New economic and social alliances, entrepreneurial opportunities, uses, and effects. Capstone course for media studies majors. Completion of course with grade of C (2.0) or better required for majors.

JMS 494 - Media, Law and Ethics
Taught by Noah Arceneaux
Importance of freedom of expression. Legal issues and responsibilities of print, broadcast, and online media, and applications to advertising, journalism, and public relations. Ethical dilemmas encountered by media professionals and communication specialists, including challenges posed by global technologies.

JMS 515 - Media Entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship
Taught by Amy Schmitz Weiss
Models of media creation, innovation, ownership, and sustainability in the digital age. Critical thinking and problem solving skills required for designing, producing, and implementing an entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial project in a media industry.

LING 354 - Language and Computers
Taught by Gabriel Doyle
Computers, computer programming languages, and "artificial intelligence" viewed from the perspective of human language.

Fall 2021

AFRAS 500 - Research Methods in Africana Studies
Taught by Sureshi M. Jayawardene
Research methods, models, and theories. Strategies for gathering data from and about Africana people towards generating social change.

BDA/GEOG 594 - Big Data Science and Analytics Platforms
Taught by Ming-Hsiang Tsou
Big data science to include analysis, data collection, filtering, GIS, machine learning, processing, text analysis, and visualization. Computational platforms, skills, and tools for conducting big data analytics with real world case studies and examples.

COMPE 560 - Computer & Data Networks
Taught by Sweta Sarkar
Wide area and local area networks, multi-layered protocols, telephone systems, modems, and network applications.

ENGL 157 - Comics and History
Taught by William Nericcio
Aesthetics, interplay of texts and images, visual communication, and changes over time.

ENG 563: Loving Books: Book as Thing, Technology, and Art
Jessica Pressman
What does it mean to say, “I love books,” especially in a digital age? This course approaches the book—our central medium for literature and literary studies—as a thing, technology, and art form: one with a long history of development.

GEOG 484 - Geographic Information Systems
Taught by André Skupin
Procedures for encoding, storage, management, and display of spatial data; theory of computer-assisted map analysis; examination of important geographic information systems.

GEOG 581 - Data Visualization
Taught by André Skupin
Principles, techniques, and practice of data visualization. Exposition of patterns and trends existing in diverse source data to include georeferenced, multivariate, and network data for purposes of communication, exploration, and discovery. Field trips and visits by practitioners may be arranged.

HONOR 313 - Seminar: Theater, Experience, and you
Taught by D.J. Hopkins
Idea, philosophy, and method of interdisciplinary studies. Various disciplines and topics from interdisciplinary perspectives, workplaces, and societal settings. Integration of a variety of schools of thought and the value of an interdisciplinary outlook. May be repeated with new content. See Class Schedule for specific content. Maximum credit six units.

JMS 200 - Intro Contemporary Media
Taught by Noah Arceneaux
Mass media and emerging forms of niche media in the global community. Theories, structures, functions, practices, problems, interrelationships, economics, critical analyses, history, and ethics.

JMS 410 - Media & Sexuality
Taught by Nathian Rodriguez
Sexuality and sex-related issues in mass mediated news, entertainment, and advertising content. Sexuality in media and its effects on interpersonal relations, sexual identity, sexual politics, social discourse, and public policy. Portrayals of conventional sexuality and of sexual minorities.

JMS 415 - Radio in the Digital Era
Taught by Nathian Rodriguez
Programming and promotional strategies for contemporary radio. Technological evolution of radio over the past century to include digital media and podcasting. Business models and regulations for online, satellite, and terrestrial radio. Basic audio production and techniques.

LDT 540 - Educational Technology
Taught by Rebecca Frazee
Rationale, foundations, theories, careers, trends, and issues in educational technology. Implications of educational technology for instruction and information in schools, government, and corporations.

LING 696 - Current Research in Language
Taught by Gabriel Doyle
Current research methods and probabilistic models examining how language is shaped by its acquisition, representation in the mind, and social uses.

RWS 411 - Digital Rhetorics
Taught by Chris Werry
Exploration of digital writing and new media literacies from a rhetorical perspective. Includes research on digital rhetoric and history of literacy to investigate new media literacies, texts, and writing practices.

TFM 465 - Compositing and Visual Effects
Taught by Sam Shpigelman
Computer-generated visual effects to include rendering and compositing techniques used in film, new media, and television.

TFM 552 - 3D Digital Storytelling
Taught by Sam Shpigelman
Narrative in animation. Pre-production and production techniques in 3D animated film.

THEA 120 - Heritage of Storytelling
Taught by Shelley Orr
Survey of significant concepts over a wide history of theatre, television, and film. Analysis of classical, contemporary realistic, and avant-garde examples, exploring influence of historical narrative forms on contemporary storytelling.

WMNST 355 - Feminist Approaches to Popular Culture
Taught by Amira Jarmakani
Gender and sexuality to include advertising, film, magazines, music, romance novels, social media, and television. How relations of power are transmitted through cultural forms. Ways popular culture shapes and is shaped by social and political contexts.

Spring 2021

HUM 410 - Studies Popular Culture
Taught by Raechel Dumas
Popular culture informed by significant cultural discourses, historical developments, and political debates. Representative works to include secondary critical readings, animated film, comics, literature, live-action film, and television

RWS 411 - Digital Rhetorics
Taught by Chris Werry
Exploration of digital writing and new media literacies from a rhetorical perspective. Includes research on digital rhetoric and history of literacy to investigate new media literacies, texts, and writing practices.

Fall 2020

AFRAS 421 - Black Urban Experience
Taught by Sureshi Jayawardene
Major social science literature of international Black urban experience. Behavior, culture, and oppressions unique to urban environments.

ANTH 422/MUSIC 561 (Arts Alive) - Area Studies: Brazil: Ethnomusicology; Music and Culture
Taught by Kevin Delgado and Erika Robb Larkins
How the forms, functions and meanings of music vary cross culturally. Understanding a society's music historically, holistically and experientially, with emphasis on non-Western music. Universals of music and music use. Ethnological theories of music and music change.

BDA 594 - Big Data Science and Analytics Platforms
Taught by Ming-Hsiang Tsou
Big data science to include analysis, data collection, filtering, GIS, machine learning, processing, text analysis, and visualization. Computational platforms, skills, and tools for conducting big data analytics with real world case studies and examples.

CLASS 140 - Introduction to Classics
Taught by David Wallace-Hare
Survey of Greek and Roman art, literature, drama, sculpture, and institutions. Influence on our culture today. Contemporary relevance of epic heroes, tragic heroines, gods and goddesses. Impact of political thought.

ENGL 562 - Web 2.0 Literary Studies
Taught by Jessica Pressman
This course explores how literature and literary studies change with digital tools and techniques. We will study the latest in digital literary studies (from big data to critical code studies, web 2.0 review culture and born-digital literature), and we experiment with new digital tools to see how format changes messages, how medium informs form and content.

WMNST 341A - Women in American History (2 sections)
Taught by Jess Whatcott
History of American social, cultural, economic, political, and intellectual institutions, focusing on the role and perspective of women. From colonization to 1860.

Spring 2020

ENGL 560 - Digital Literature
Taught by Jessica Pressman
This course provides an introduction to born-digital literature— literature created on the computer and read on the computer, wherein computational practices are part of literary poetics— from the 1990s to today.

HIST 455 - Digital History
Taught by David Cline
Tools and practices used by historians to conduct research and present findings and results through a technology lens. Challenges, issues, theories, and uses of digital history.

LING 354 - Language & Computers
Taught by Gabriel Doyle
Computers, computer programming languages, and "artificial intelligence" viewed from the perspective of human language.

WMNST 341B - Women in American History
Taught by Jess Whatcott
History of American social, cultural, economic, political, and intellectual institutions, focusing on the role and perspective of women. From 1860 to the present. Satisfies the graduation requirement in American Institutions

Fall 2019

AFRAS 421: Black Urban Experience
Taught by Dr. Sareshi Jayawardene
Major social science literature of international Black urban experience. Behavior, culture, and oppressions unique to urban environment.

CLASS 360: Sex Gender and the Erotic in the Ancient Mediterranean
Taught by Dr. Danielle Smotherman Bennett
Why did the ancient world have so many erotic images? What are the rights and status of women, transgender, and homosexual individuals in antiquity? What is love in the minds of people in the ancient Mediterranean? What counts as an appropriate sexual relationship in the ancient world? These are just some of the questions we will consider in this course and the answers to some of them may surprise you! In this class we will explore ideas about sex, gender identity, and the erotic in ancient Mediterranean cultures, including Mesopotamian, Egypt, Greece and Rome. We will focus on ancient Greece and bring in the other ancient Mediterranean cultures as comparisons. By examining evidence from material culture and literature, we will explore ancient notions about gender, homosexuality, and pederasty within their cultural contexts. Gender and feminist theory will be applied to readings of ancient texts (in translation) and to the study of material culture, such as the numerous gendered and erotic depictions that appear in sculptures, ceramics, and luxury items. Throughout the course, we will reflect on similarities and differences between the ancient world and modern society.

ED 895: Visual-Based Research Methods
Taught by Dr. Marva Cappello
This doctoral course will survey the current landscape of visual-based research methods with two major goals in mind: to describe and interpret the theoretical groundings for visual-based research methods and to design and conduct qualitative research with an array of visual-based data generation tools.

ENG 220: Introduction to Literature
Taught by Dr. William Nericcio
The title of this class is, of course, a tease—a titillating excuse for you to take a General Education class in Literature and Cultural Studies, as opposed to, say, an online class on tetherball, or god knows whatever else is passing for a GE at SDSU these days. In our English 220: Introduction to Literature class we will read books, and write about them--and our focus is all things naked, sexy, and bestial! But that does not mean we will be altogether pornographic. Instead, we will focus on diverse and exciting stories that are written (novels), screened (television and film), drawn (graphic narrative/comics), and shot (photography) that reveal humanity at its most beastly, most naked, most sexy.

So our mad dash through 16 weeks of beastly, sexy, naked humans will be an adventure—the lineup of movies and books and comics is still in flux but for sure we will be reading The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells (Broadview Press edition); Mean, by Myriam Gurba; and others. We will also have in-class movie screenings--these cinematic required texts include Sorry to Bother You by Boots Riley; Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus by Steven Shainberg; and Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (from which this class stole its name!).

Other likely figures on the syllabus are Diane Arbus, Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, Francesca Woodman, Ana Mendieta and more.

The class is open to all majors; graduate students and advanced undergraduates who want to take the class for upper-division or graduate credit should come see me after the first class.

HIST 455: Digital History
Taught by Dr. Angel David Nieves
Tools and practices used by historians to conduct research and present findings and results through a technology lens. Challenges, issues, theories, and uses of digital history.

JMS 418: Social Media Leadership: Building Online Communities
Taught by Dr. Rebecca Nee
Leadership in an online community environment. Developing effective strategies to cultivate and moderate communities of practice using digital technologies and social media platforms. Principles of social media engagement and effectiveness as applied to online communities. Writing and creating content to encourage participation and interaction.

JMS 430: Digital Journalism
Taught by Dr. Amy Schmitz Weiss
Using digital and mobile platforms to publish news content and how to use such platforms for news reporting and gathering purposes. Data-driven journalism, online writing styles, web programming, social media strategies, and digital design principles.

LING 571: Computational Corpus Linguistics
Taught by Dr. Robert Malouf
Advances in technology have revolutionized the way linguists approach their data. Using computers, extremely large bodies of text (``corpora'') can be collected and analyzed at a level of detail that only a decade ago would have been unthinkable. Sources like the British National Corpus, the Corpus of Historical American English, and Google Books collection allow us access to language use across an unprecedented range of time and space. For anyone studying human communication or culture, the accelerating growth of the World Wide Web and other natural language resources have made techniques for dealing with very large texts more important than ever.

Through a combination of lectures, demonstrations, and hands-on exercises, this course will give students an introduction to the skills necessary for computer-aided text manipulation. Students will learn to search text databases using on-line tools, to write Python programs to manipulate large natural language corpora, to apply quantitative linguistic measures to existing texts, and to formulate, carry out, and describe their own corpus-based linguistic research projects.

RWS 411: Digital Rhetorics
Taught by Dr. Chris Werry
RWS411 examines what it means to be literate in the age of Facebook and YouTube, and how we can think critically about the cultural and cognitive consequences of the digital shift. We will carefully analyze the language authors use to make claims about old and new media literacies, scrutinize definitions of new media literacy, and consider the role new media is playing in higher education, journalism, politics and popular culture. We will also examine some tools, platforms and practices that have practical potential for developing new media literacies. Our goal is to leverage and share the collective experience of the class (as Weinberger says, the smartest thinker in the room is the room). Thus we will experiment, break things, fail, have fun, and try to gain some critical perspective on the tools we use.

Spring 2019

ENG 562: Digital Methods for the Humanities
Taught by Jessica Pressman
This new course is a revolutionary experiment and pilot program for SDSU’s Digital Humanities Initiative that will provide students with an introduction to media studies, theory, and history as well as to a wide variety of digital methods for research, writing, and thinking. Lead by a scholar of electronic literature and new media theory, students will learn how new digital methods can serve the Humanities and also how they inform the emergent field known as “Digital Humanities.” Each week will bring a different guest lecturer, a professor at SDSU and a member of SDSU’s Digital Humanities Initiative, who will teach a different digital method from a different disciplinary perspective. The range of learning includes, but is not limited to, virtual reality methods of studying history (History), empirical studies of social media use and identity construction (Journalism and Media Studies), computational analysis (Linguistics), info-visualizations and Digital Humanities practices (Library), and more. This is an opportunity to learn about the humanities via digital methods and also to learn about Digital Humanities in the first-ever course of its kind offered at SDSU.

GEOG 104: Geographic Information Science and Spatial Reasoning
Taught by Ming-Hsiang Tsou
Fundamental concepts in geographic information systems, cartography, remote sensing, spatial statistics, and global positioning systems. Use of critical technologies in addressing human and environmental problems.

GEOG 381: Computerized Map Design
Taught by Ming-Hsiang Tsou
Art and science of creating digital maps as media for describing and analyzing geographic phenomena. Computer laboratory instruction and practice in cartographic techniques with emphasis on thematic maps and geographic information systems.

GEOG 583: Internet Mapping and Distributed GI Services
Taught by Ming-Hsiang Tsou
Current development of Internet mapping and cartographic skills for web-based maps (multimedia, animation, and interactive design). Fundamental theories of distributed GIS to support Inter- net mapping with focus on distributed component technologies, Internet map servers, and web services.

GEOG 780 Seminar: Web Mapping, Social Media, and Big Data
Taught by Ming-Hsiang Tsou
Spatial analytic techniques from image processing, remote sensing, geographic information systems, cartography or quantitative methods.

HIST 503: Ancient Rome
Taught by Elizabeth Pollard
Perhaps ironically, scholars of “classical” antiquity have been at the forefront of digital approaches to the past. HIST 503 taps into that vein of digital antiquity with an approach that empowers students to employ the digital humanities to engage the swaths of time and space across which ancient Roman history played out. HIST 503 (Ancient Rome) familiarizes students with important events, people, themes, and arguments in Roman History from the Etruscan “monarchy” through the “Fall” of Rome (ca. 1000 BCE through 500 CE) and exposes students to the resources (both ancient and modern) used by scholars of Roman history to investigate them. In this course, students learn to: 1) identify and explain major people, concepts, and events in Roman History; 2) analyze central developments in Roman History; 3) interpret primary and ancient secondary sources for constructing Roman History; 4) explore the state of the scholarly arguments on various issues in Roman History; and 5) construct digital “micro-publications” to visualize Roman History by showcasing the analysis, interpretation, and exploration, described in SLOs 2, 3, and 4 (above). The digital humanities output of previous iterations of the course is described and archived at https://sites.google.com/sdsu.edu/hist503/.

LING 583: Statistical Methods in Text Analysis
Taught by Rob Malouf

According to industry folklore, up to 80% of the information owned by large organizations is in the form of ‘unstructured’ text documents. During this course, students will collaboratively build applications that extract usable information from a large collection of texts. We will cover techniques for collecting, organizing and annotating textual databases. The course activities will familiarize students with the use of a range of standard statistical methods for analysis of large texts, including Markov models, Bayesian classifiers, maximum entropy models, support vector machines, and neural nets, as applied to tasks such as topic modeling, relation detection, and sentiment analysis.

ED 895: Visual-Based Research Methods
Taught by Marva Capello
This course will survey the current landscape of visual-based research methods with two major goals in mind: to describe and interpret the theoretical groundings for visual-based research methods and to design and conduct qualitative research with an array of visual-based data generation tools.

Fall 2018

Africana Studies

AFRAS 421: Black Urban Experience
Taught by Sureshi M. Jayawardene
Major social science literature of international Black urban experience. Behavior, culture, and oppressions unique to urban environment.

English and Comparative Literature

ENGL 503: Adolescent Film and Media
Taught by Angel Daniel Matos
Why has the adolescent become such a prominent and celebrated figure in cinema from the mid-twentieth century onward? How does the figure of the adolescent reflect and mobilize different social and cultural concerns? Do teen films represent adolescence as a developmental period full of potential and promise, or do they represent adolescence as a phase that people must overcome? Why is it customary for older actors to portray teenage life on screen, and what are the issues of this tradition? In this course, we will examine representations of adolescence in American and global cinema from the 1950s to the present in order to address these questions. We will pay close attention to how our understanding of adolescence has shifted over the decades, how adolescent thought and experience is visually aestheticized, and how teen representation is inflected by domains of identity such as gender, sexuality, race, ability, and class. We will also scrutinize the different stereotypes and social groups that have been represented in these films, and develop an understanding of the different subgenres of teen cinema that have emerged over the decades, including the coming-of-age film, the teen comedy, the slasher film, and the school film.

ENGL 562: Digital Methods for the Humanities
Taught by Jessica Pressman
This new course is a revolutionary experiment and pilot program for SDSU’s Digital Humanities Initiative that will provide students with an introduction to media studies, theory, and history as well as to a wide variety of digital methods for research, writing, and thinking. Lead by a scholar of electronic literature and new media theory, students will learn how new digital methods can serve the Humanities and also how they inform the emergent field known as “Digital Humanities.” Each week will bring a different guest lecturer, a professor at SDSU and a member of SDSU’s Digital Humanities Initiative, who will teach a different digital method from a different disciplinary perspective. The range of learning includes, but is not limited to, virtual reality methods of studying history (History), empirical studies of social media use and identity construction (Journalism and Media Studies), computational analysis (Linguistics), info-visualizations and Digital Humanities practices (Library), and more. This is an opportunity to learn about the humanities via digital methods and also to learn about Digital Humanities in the first-ever course of its kind offered at SDSU.

History

HIST 496a: Digital History
Taught by Angel David Nieves
This course blends a traditional seminar in the theory and issues of digital history with hands-on training in its tools and practices in order to better understand how technology is transforming the way historians conduct research and present their work. Students in this course will learn about computational tools for data analysis; the new ways historians record, store, organize and disseminate their findings; and about the theories and practice of digital history through readings, workshops, websites, field trips, discussions, and by having professional historians, archivists, librarians, and digital project directors as guest speakers. Using an experiential and flipped classroom approach, students will explore the possibilities and challenges of doing public history in digital spaces, applying what they learn to their own self-designed digital public history projects. Students will each identify a digital collection of materials around which they will build an online project. In developing a digital history project, students will define their target audience(s); establish a set of outcomes; identify and adopt a delivery platform; determine an organizational system; create content, including narrative and interpretative text; and devise a set of criteria for evaluating the project’s impact. Students will develop detailed work plans to ensure timely and successful completion of their projects. This course challenges students to think broadly about where the field of history is headed and how libraries, archives, academics, publishers, and the public are thinking about how to preserve the past and curate unique projects to share with the world.

HIST 680: Spatial Humanities
Taught by Angel David Nieves
Spatial humanities relies upon powerful geospatial technologies and methods to explore new questions about the relationship of space (physical, imagined, manmade or otherwise) to human behavior. It represents a bridging across disciplines, and may engage with ethnic studies (Chicana/o Studies, Africana Studies, Asian American Studies, etc.) history, archaeology, literary studies, women’s studies, queer studies, area studies, and cultural studies, to name but a few areas. This seminar course introduces graduate students to the theory and methods of the spatial humanities, while examining the tools, theories, and methodologies of social justice. Engaging with spatial theory and learning technical methodologies students will learn to develop an understanding of the research questions and tools available in this new field of scholarly and applied inquiry while grappling with issues of social justice. Students will work throughout the semester in project-based learning grounded in spatial, intersectional, and critical race theories.

Humanities

HUM 580 / MALAS 600c: Modern Technology and the Ancient World
Taught by Danielle Bennett
In the contemporary world, digital re-creations of sites and objects from the ancient world often appear in movies and TV, such as Ben-Hurand Game of Thrones, and in video games, such as Assassin's Creed Origins. Modern technology also provides tantalizing prospects for a deeper engagement with the material culture in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In this course, we will explore the emerging scholarship concerning digital humanities for the study of the ancient world. Geography and mapping, digital dissemination of texts, and visual reconstructions of sites and objects, including 3-D modeling will come to the fore as we learn about the ancient Mediterranean. We’ll be critical consumers of the digital tools for the study the ancient world.

Reoccurring Courses

Education

English and Comparative Literature

ENG 220: The Perils and Promise of Technology
Taught by Peter Herman
The purpose of this class is to introduce students to the study of literature, but to do so in a more pointed fashion that will demonstrate literature’s uncanny ability to help us think complexly about complex problems. To that end, we will be looking at how literature deals with the related problems of technology and utopias, because so often today technology is promoted as a means of achieving a utopia, meaning, a perfect society. But as we will see, neither the claims made for technology nor the sense that technology can create an ideal society, are new. We will start with the revival of the utopian genre by Thomas More, and then to texts that deal more overtly with technology. We conclude with two books, M. T. Anderson, Feed, and the very controversial novel by Dave Eggers, The Circuit, that ask us to reconsider our reliance on the web and computers as well as an episode or two of “Black Mirror” and a guest lecture on how electronic literature intersects with our theme.

ENG 527: Digital Literature
Taught by Jessica Pressman
What happens to literature and its study when text moves from page to screen? This course examines works of digital literature (literature created on the computer to be read on the computer) to understand how this emergent literary form affects the way we read, study, and understand literature.

ENG 527: The 21st-C Experimental Novel
Taught by Jessica Pressman
This course reads novels (print and digital) published in the new millennium whose pages expose the influence of new media technologies. We examine these works in order to analyze what they have to say about globalism, the role of the literary, the experience of living in an age of information overload, and other topics at the center of our contemporary digital culture.

ENG 563: Digital Literature
Taught by Jessica Pressman
This course examines works of digital literature (literature created on the computer to be read on the computer) to understand how this emergent literary form affects the way we read, study, and understand literature.

ENG 563: Cyberfeminism
Taught by Jessica Pressman
“Cyberfeminism” is a term from the 1990s that has been nearly forgotten, along with much of the radical born-digital art from those early, pivotal days of the Web and cyberculture. “Concerned with countering the perceived dominance of men in the use and development of information technology, the Internet, etc.” (OED), cyberfeminism is about perspective, ideology critique, and media archaeology. This course examines seminal texts of cultural theory and digital literature from the 1980s-early 2000s focused on the relationship between gender and digital culture to recover forgotten threads from digital culture’s recent but compact history to weave a web for understanding our contemporary cultural context.

ENG 563: The Book in the Digital Age
Taught by Jessica Pressman
This class takes the topic of the book in the digital age as an opportunity to consider the book as a medium and symbol– a technology perfected over a thousand years and a powerful cultural symbol. Part critical theory, part History of the Book, this class gives students a historical perspective on contemporary debates about reading, knowledge, and literature.

ENG 563: Critical Digital Literacy
Taught by Jessica Pressman
What does it mean to be “literate” in the age of digital data, screens, and hyperattention? What does “reading and writing” describe in the age of Twitter, Facebook, and mobile digital narratives? What, if any, kinds of contemporary communication practices are uniquely “digital”? And, the big one: How do digital technologies and the Internet affect the way we read, write, and think? In order to address these questions—indeed, in order to think critically about our digital culture– we need to know our media history. This class pursues digital literacy as a concept and a practice, a topic and a skill-set. Students will learn to think critically and creatively about cultural, communicative, and cognitive consequences of the digital shift. Together, we will explore, analyze, and historicize the complicated sets of literacies that the digital both promotes and demands.

ENG 576A: Literary Publication & Editing Workshop
Taught by Jennifer Minniti-Shippey
Considering a career in literary publishing? Interested to know what kinds of editorial jobs are out there? Love the idea of discovering new literature, editing new works, and promoting authors? Join the Managing Editor of Poetry International literary journal for this wide-ranging, seminar-style course. We get hands-on with a wide range of skills, from web design to InDesign, creative content to copyediting, event planning to saddlestitching, and everything in between. Meet with industry professionals, including small press founders, professional grant writers, literary agents, literary journal editors, and international website editors. You'll finish the semester with experience in multiple facets of the industry and a fresh list of publication credits to your name. Graduates of this course have interned at Harper Collins, The Zack Company, the Summer Writing Institute in New York, and IDW Publishing, among others. Excellent experience for graduate and undergraduate students alike--and now, a prerequisite for completing a Minor in Creative Publishing & Editing!

ENG 576B: Literary Publication & Editing Workshop
Taught by Jennifer Minniti-Shippey
Learn to make books! This advanced publishing workshop, a required course for the Creative Publishing & Editing certificate and minor, is designed to give motivated students the opportunity to work as editors of a professional press. The course will build on the work of ENGL 576A, as editorial boards create thematic anthologies of literary work, design print & digital books, and work with professional programs such as InDesign and CreateSpace. We'll host several publishing industry professionals during the semester, from book designers to small press founders. While ENGL 576A is listed as a prerequisite for this class, graduates of ENGL 576 are eligible to enroll, and other interested students are encouraged to reach out to the professor. Don't miss out on this unique professional publishing opportunity!

CLT 595: New Media Theory
Taught by Jessica Pressman
This course serves as an introduction to the critical and historical study of digital media and culture. Situating “new media” in technical and cultural histories that precede and inform our own, we recognize “the digital” as having a history that deserves analysis. We approach this topic through paradigms provided by literary and cultural criticism, reading central texts from the history of computing and the development of digital culture.

ENG 604: Book History
Taught by Jessica Pressman
This graduate seminar examines seminal writings from the scholarship in The History of the Book.

ENG 726: How We Read Now - Literary Criticism and Theories of Reading
Taught by Jessica Pressman
In their now-seminal special issue of the journal Representations (2009) titled “How We Read Now,” scholars Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus ask what literary criticism looks like—and should look like—in our digital, neoliberal, twenty-first century. They are not alone. From Bruno Latour’s “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” to Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique, scholars are questioning the contemporary toolkit of literary criticism. This course uses the opportunity posed by this trend in self-reflection to study the history of our discipline and its critical reading practices. We read seminal examples of literary critical reading practices from the early 20th century to the present—texts representative of New Criticism, New Historicism, Reader-Response Theory, Symptomatic Reading, Distant Reading, Actor-Network Theory, Digital Humanities, and more—in order to gain a foundation from which to understand and determine “how we read now.”

Geography

GEOG 380: Map Investigation
Taught by André Skupin
The fundamentals of geographic mapping underlying GIS, GPS, cartography and visualization. Topics include map projections, locational reference systems, topographic and thematic mapping, and map design. Includes practical mapping exercises, including first skills using GIS software and the creation of simple map products.

GEOG 484: Geographic Information Systems
Taught by André Skupin
Introduction to concepts and principles of GIS, including data structures, database design, and spatial analysis techniques. Development of significant practical skills in the use of GIS software for analysis and visualization of geographic data.

GEOG 581: Data Visualization
Taught by André Skupin
Principles, techniques, and practice of data visualization. Course introduces students to how patterns and structures in diverse types of source data, including georeferenced, multivariate, and network data, can be visualized for communication, exploration, and pattern discovery.

GEOG 780: Knowledge Visualization
Taught by André Skupin
The current state and emerging future of knowledge visualization, based on contemporary trends, evolving techniques, and real-world applications. Seminar addresses several distinct data types and the different means for handling them, from text mining to social network analysis and semantic web approaches.

History

HIST 157 - Comics and History
Taught by Elizabeth Pollard, Mary Stout, and Van Tarpley
This course examines the aesthetic, formal, and stylistic features of comics across cultures, from the distant past (everything from paleolithic cave paintings to medieval manuscripts) up to an in-depth look at comics from the last century. Students develop an appreciation of, and a language for, analyzing comics as an art form. They explore how comics reflect the aesthetics of a particular moment and how those reflections change over time. Digital Humanities approaches are crucial to the undertaking! Students not only engage digital comics (such as webtoons) but they also digitally annotate comics to call attention to their formal features. A series of scaffolded digital annotation assignments culminates in a collaborative timeline that traces the changes in how comics tackle a particular issue over time. AY 2020/21 has focused on how comics have addressed social justice issues, from wealth inequality and women’s rights to immigration and racial injustice.

Humanities

HUM 370: American Culture
Taught by Linnea Zeiner
This class engages with countercultures and subcultures as they struggle against the sanctioned behaviors of mainstream 19th and 20th-century America and claim their aesthetic territory through multivalent, politically articulate and illicit performances.

HUM 409: The Future
Taught by Linnea Zeiner
This course explores the broad spectrum of realities that are present in literature and media describing “The Future” [Link to https://sdsuthefuture.wordpress.com/about/]. Some principal postures that will be examined in detail are: how gendered and racialized spaces occur in media; how “real” is a present challenge to understand in the face of interactive medias and technology advancements; and what trends arise in narratives within specific historical contexts. This seminar will conduct critical screenings of film and television through engagement with the works of scholars and theorists past and present. Finally, this is an interactive class using new-media and digital platforms in a Learning Research Studio. This specialized environment supports students as they learn new technologies, create digital expressions of course topics, discuss theory and critique visualizations.

Journalism and Media Studies

JMS 428 - Digital & Social Media Analytics
Taught by Rebecca Frazee
Measurement standards, principles, and outcomes of digital and social media. Digital data collection methods, data analysis metrics, data reporting, presentation tools. Using analytics to enhance organizational effectiveness.

JMS 430: Digital Journalism
Taught by Amy Schmitz Weiss
Using digital and mobile platforms to publish news content and how to use such platforms for news reporting and gathering purposes. Data-driven journalism, online writing styles, web programming, social media strategies, and digital design principles.

JMS 492 - Creative Uses Emerging Media
Taught by Nathian Rodriguez
New and often unexpected convergence of media institutions, technology, and content. New economic and social alliances, entrepreneurial opportunities, uses, and effects. Capstone course for media studies majors. Completion of course with grade of C (2.0) or better required for majors.

See the Class Schedule or SDSU General Catalog for more information.

Course Offerings Educating Across Departments and Disciplines in a Digital Age

Spring 2022

Fall 2021

Spring 2021

Fall 2020

Spring 2020

Fall 2019

Spring 2019

Fall 2018

Africana Studies

English and Comparative Literature

History

Humanities

Reoccurring Courses

Education

English and Comparative Literature

Geography

History

Humanities

Journalism and Media Studies

Course Offerings
Educating Across Departments and Disciplines in a Digital Age