Writing about Literature in the Digital Age is a free eBook by students at Brigham Young University who are pushing boundaries of traditional literary study to explore the benefits of digital tools in academic writing. This collaborative effort is a case study of how electronic text formats and blogging can be effectively used to explore literary works, develop one’s thinking publicly, and research socially. Students used literary works...
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
What it was like to be on "the design team"
Being on the design team was A LOT of work. I already had a base knowledge of working with the InDesign program, but I know that my team mate, Sam McGrath, spent a lot of time getting familiar with the program before we even started. InDesign was the program we used to compile the entire ebook, and I know that it's a great design program when you are completely familiar with it, but when you aren't, you confront of little quirks that sometimes turn into big frustrations. Another program that was very helpful in our work was...
What I have learned this term
The course outline we had for this class was to become more familiar with and appreciate the changing modes to reading literature and writing about it. This expected outcome was hard for me to see at first, because I was so used to the cookie cutter English major expectations. Starting a blog for a class to turn contribute our writing ideas was so new to me, and I enjoyed that aspect of the class.As far as writing styles go, this class was surprising and sometimes confusing about what kind of writing styles were expected for...
Monday, June 13, 2011
The digital age kind of depresses me
I've been thinking about this for the last few weeks as we have been discussing literature and writing in the digital age, and today we talked about it more in my Print Publishing class today and it made me kind of sad. Remember the movie "You've Got Mail"? I love that movie. And as I watched it a few weeks ago, it made me sad to see the irony of it. Tom Hanks puts Meg Ryan's adorable neighborhood bookstore out of business with his book superstore a la Borders, but they still find love in the end. If they were to make a sequel...
Thursday, June 9, 2011
My chapter, bio, photo, and "Tweethis" statement
Here's my bio photo:My chapter can be found here.My tweetable statement: Modern writers are connecting with readers through modern means of communication: essentially creating a living, working, and involved relationship.character count: 148. it's good? ...
Mastering the Art of Class Project Combining
As a graduating senior, I have learned how valuable it is to connect your classes to create content for your class projects and assignments. I'm not talking about using the exact same paper for two different classes. Not exactly. What I'm talking about is using different aspects of your research or learnings in one class and using them in your other class projects. This term, I was especially successful at doing this and it has really...
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Possible Chapter Images
Morrison discussing Song of Solomon on Oprah:Image from Academy of Achievement: http://www.achievement.org/achievers/win0/large/win0-023.jpgThe "in-your-face" painting of Morrison:Image url: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l3hpcfcAM41qc53v4o1_500.jpgOr, the interactive, public speaker Morrison:Image url: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/Toni_Morrison_2008-2.jpg/240px-Toni_Morrison_2008-2.j...
Final Draft
Bringing the Author to Life in the Digital Age How involved does a writer get in his or her reader’s lives? How involved do the readers get in the writer’s life? If we had thought about this question 100 years ago, or even 50, we would probably say that there is very little involvement between the two. Literary theorist Roland Barthes certainly thinks so. In fact, Barthes’ theories about an author who is essentially “dead”—meaning that the novel and its creator have nothing to do with each other—may seem logical in a non-technological...
Monday, June 6, 2011
On my way to a final draft. Thoughts?
How involved does a writer get in his or her reader’s lives? How involved do the readers get in the writer’s life? If we had thought about this question 100 years ago, or even 50, we would probably say that there is very little involvement between the two. Literary theorist Roland Barthes certainly thinks so as well. In fact, Barthes’ theories about an author who is essentially “dead”—meaning that the novel and its creator have nothing to do with each other—may seem logical in a non-technological world. But in today’s modern...
Friday, June 3, 2011
Working title: Bringing the Author to Life in the Digital Age
Excuse the choppiness: this outline is a draft of how I want my chapter to develop, point by point.Intro: literary theories of Roland Barthes who "killed the author"--meaning that all that is important is the text and no supplemental information about the author or from the author is necessary. Through developing technology and social media, this is not the case any more. Authors are using digital means to connect with their readers. The author/reader relationship is completely changing in the digital age.Toni Morrison began...
Using InDesign to create an Ebook
Ok, so I played around with InDesign to see how to create an ebook format. It was actually pretty easy. Rather than exporting the document to be a pdf file which most people usually do, all you do is export it as an epub format. I assume then, that that's how we can upload it to the place of our choice, but that's still what I'm not sure about.So for our ebook, I think that what would be easiest would be to compile all of our chapters into a word document or google document. We can then place that text into the InDesign document...
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
The Tower of eBabel
I have realized as I have researched ebooks the last couple of days, that I really don't know that much about ebooks! I mean, I own a Kindle, but like I said earlier, all I do to get books on that is click a button.So, to find out more about the different types of ebooks, I went to the ultimate source: wikipedia. What would I do without it? It was helpful to me to read about the different formats, especially in considering which format I feel would be best for our class project in creating an ebook.Here is a page that was helpful...
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