In this course students will experiment with various digital tools to take apart  - or hack - Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. "The digital humanities has made hacking a discipline. “Hacking” these days means to adapt, manipulate, and make productive use out of a given technology or technological context or platform" (Fyfe 3). Students will be encouraged to approach the text in new ways, through distant reading, through databases, by exploring existing digital projects, creating maps and analysing sentiments. We will experiment with text annotation and build a hypertext to help us obeserve the novel as it is woven out of multiple narrative strands drawn from other fictional texts, from poetry, from history, from science, from philosophy, from mythology. Finally we will build a map of the influence of Frankenstein on successive literature, film, figurative art, music, and beyond. The various experiments with digital tools built by the students in this class will be curated in a digital exhibition built in Omeka.

Paul Fyfe, “Digital Humanities Unplugged,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 5, no. 3 (2011), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/3/000106/000106.html.

Students will learn how to use digital tools to interrogate a fictional text.

They will exit the course with

- Advanced close reading and critical skills

- in depth knowledge of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, its literary influences, context, and impact and of the critical skills required for the study of fiction.

- a theoretical understanding of the uses and challenges of a digital approach to literature and humanities

- the ability to employ digital tools for literary research (e.g. textual annotation, mapping, database construction, metadata description)

- the skills to critically assess and evaluate the results of the research performed and write a shareable report of the findings.

- the experience of curating a digital exhibition of findings produced by the class

ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENTS AND EXAMINATION POLICY

Students are allowed a total of four absences per term, whether they are excused or not, barring very serious emergencies. Students are asked NOT to provide justification and to take responsibility for attendance. 

More than four absences, whether excused or not, will result in a grade drop (e.g. from A to A-) per absence.

You cannot make-up a major exam (midterm or final) without the permission of the Dean’s Office. The Dean’s Office will grant such permission only when the absence was caused by a serious impediment, such as a documented illness, hospitalization or death in the immediate family (in which you must attend the funeral) or other situations of similar gravity. Absences due to other meaningful conflicts, such as job interviews, family celebrations, travel difficulties, student misunderstandings or personal convenience, will not be excused. Students who will be absent from a major exam must notify the Dean’s Office prior to that exam. Absences from class due to the observance of a religious holiday will normally be excused. Individual students who will have to miss class to observe a religious holiday should notify the instructor by the end of the Add/Drop period to make prior arrangements for making up any work that will be missed. The final exam period runs until December 15, 2023.