Seminar / Hauptseminar: Publishing and New Media Publishing / Publizieren in/mit New Media

        The objective of the seminar is to explore aspects of publishing in the age of new media technology and new media scholarship. "New media" describes any digital media production that is interactive and digitally distributed. There are two fundamental points that distinguish "new" media from media that preceded it, much of which still exists: 1) how it is transmitted and accessible: both the new emphasis on the integration of text, pictures, video, sound; and the increasing use of the internet as the vehicle and 2) interactivity: this is both a defining feature of "new" media and likely to be the most significant area for "future new" media development. in the seminar we will study the history and current situation of new media in most of its aspects, incl. the impact of new media in mass communication, the processes of publishing in scholarship and in the popular and specialized media, etc. For supplementary material, see The History of the Book, Publishing, and Reading: Cultural Participation and the Sociology of Reading. The seminar includes presentations and discussions with focus on the history, politics, methods, and processes of scholarly publishing and the current situation of scholarly publishing. Presentations in the seminar include also practical matters such as digital editing and the world wide web. Discussions in class are based on material presented and on group research projects assigned by the instructors. Das Seminar beinhaltet die Teilbereiche Theorie, Analyse und Praxis. Für einen Teilnahmeschein ist erforderlich: aktive Teilnahme im Seminar und ein schriftlicher Beitrag von 2000 Wörtern oder die Ausarbeitung eines Projektes (auch als Gruppenarbeit). Für einen Leistungsschein is erforderlich: aktive Teilnahme im Seminar und eine Hausarbeit von 8000 Wörtern im Stil des MLA: Modern Language Association of America. Themen für Hausarbeiten müssen mit den Seminarleiter persönlich besprochen werden.

        Background material used for the seminars include: Altbach, Philip G., and Edith S. Hoshino, eds. International Book Publishing: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 1995); CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/> (Purdue UP); Fiormonte, Domenico, and Jonathan Usher, eds. New Media and the Humanities: Research and Applications (Oxford: U of Oxford, Humanities Computing Unit, 2001); Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2001); Glaister, Geoffrey Ashall. Encyclopedia of the Book. 2nd ed. (London: Oak Knoll P and The British Library, 1996); MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 5th ed. (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1999); Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven, ed. Thematic Cluster History of the Book and the Study of Literature, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée23.1 (March 1996): 207-58; Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven and Philip Kreisel, "Urban English-Speaking Canadian Literary Readership: the Results of a Pilot Study," Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Literature, the Media and the Arts21.3 (1992): 211-38; Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven. "Toward a Theory of Cumulative Canon Formation: Readership in English Canada," Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature27.3 (1994): 107-19; Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven. "The New Knowledge Management: Online Research and Publishing in the Humanities." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 3.1 (2001): <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb01-1/totosy01.html>.

        Please write the paper in the length of 2000 words in the MLA style of paranethetical sources and a works cited (for a style guide link to <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/proced2.html>). The essays are to be sent in an e-mail to the instructor at <totosy@medienkomm.uni-halle.de> (no attachments, please).