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WRITING 200

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    1. WRITING 160
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Writing with Digital and Social Media

Credits: 3 | May be elected 3 times for credit | May be elected more than once in the same term

In WRITING 200, students analyze and apply rhetorical principles in their writing with “new media.” As members of a media-saturated culture, we know that print text is only one form of writing, and sometimes it is not the most effective choice. Because all of us make sense of texts and issues in a variety of ways, these courses ask students to utilize multimodal (visual, aural, etc.) forms of communication and become more informed, critical consumers of new media writing themselves.

WRITING 200 - LSA COURSE GUIDE LINK

Writing 200.001 - The Art of Zines

Do you like making things? Are your ideas waiting for a way to be expressed? 

You may be ready to make some zines.

Our making-centered course will include a glimpse into zine history so far and why zines can matter to individuals, communities and movements. We will explore zines from DIY culture, punk, and Riot Grrrl, including photo zines by Eric Nakamura of Giant Robot, comic zines by Ben Passmore, and perzines by Alex Wrekk and many others. We will build our own zines in a series of experiments, using writing, drawing (stick figures welcome!) and doodling, collage, photos, sharpies, washi tape, and found objects/ephemera; we will try out typewriters, sticker art, button-making, creating flyers, and postering. Our class will focus on process and experimenting, with lots of feedback and revision, as we self-publish our own zines. Our class also will experiment with building zine community on campus, and will produce Zine Happenings on central campus during winter semester. Everyone will have the opportunity to be part of a regional zine fest in March, Zine Jamboree, at the Ypsilanti Freighthouse.

Writing 200.002 - The Rhetoric of Maps and Atlases

On one hand, maps tend to be practical: where are we going, and how do we get there? What’s the lay of the land of this place I’m in? What should I see while I’m here? Where can I find a bus stop, parking deck, hospital, restaurant? What’s the geographical relationship of one country to another? What did our town look like a century ago? Because of their authority (visible in that they’re bought and sold everywhere and generally understood as neutral reflections of physical reality), we assume that maps are neutral. On the other hand, even the neutrality of seemingly straightforward maps is a bit slippery. For example, the virtues of the Mercator world map versus other flat representations of the globe have been hotly debated because different approaches to projection (the way mapmakers represent the spherical surface of the earth onto a flat surface) distort the actual geography in different ways. 

Maps can be used to represent data of all kinds (per capita income in different states, political disappearances in Argentina during the Junta, the density of different kinds of populations or business in different places, or fattest bears etc.), and maps’ brands of data representation tells a story–a story that makes an argument. Countless maps for self-guided (or host-guided!) tours populate airport kiosks, online travel sites, and local gift shops. You’ve probably heard of walking ghost tours in Charleston, SC; the story of the Freedom Trail in Boston; the story of the Rivera Courtyard in the Detroit Institute of the Arts; the stories of architecture in Chicago riverboat tours, etc. The people who design these maps and tours have to decide what stories they want to tell, and that means making decisions about what gets represented and what doesn’t–what’s significant and what’s not. And that means maps have inherent biases reflecting the attitudes and purposes of the people who make them. 

In this class, we will examine maps and atlases (collections of maps) of various kinds; learn how to hand-make maps; experiment with making digital StoryMaps; learn how to make maps & atlases as data representations that tell a story; and create culturally specific walking tours about subjects (and locations) of your interest. This course requires active participation with a high level of discussion and collaboration. There will be DIY days where we work with material artifacts, days when we visit map collections on campus, days when we try new digital platforms, days when we do walking tours, etc. We use an Engagement Grading scheme (contract-based). 

Writing 200.003 - Time and Digital Presence

What is your screentime? Going online might feel like entering an alternate world, a type of escape from the rush of reality. But can going online help us become more present in this world, in our physical and embodied lives? Can we really take our time back, use the internet to get offline? This course invites us to investigate how we might revisit time online to boost real-world presence and embodiment. We will investigate how digital platforms and technologies shape our experience of time itself through the ever-present feed, its impact on our understanding of intimate human emotion, and the stakes this has for our own personal histories and identities. We will develop our rhetorical awareness by looking closely at digital movements that engage in resistant forms of digital presence, including joyful creation, digital minimalism, experimental storytelling, slow content creation, and digital engagement grounded in physical location. Along with encountering theory, essays, and creative art pieces, we will test the limits of our digital lives through our own real-world lived experiments that ask us to reinterpret our online use and ground ourselves in our location. Then, we will express what happens to our time and presence through our own creative digital storytelling projects. 

Sweetland Center for Writing
105 S. State Street
1310 North Quad
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285
734.764.0429
734.763.9148
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