This course has two intersecting goals. The first is the examination of the meaning of Washington to fans of particular media products, of history or simply of current events and the latest news cycle.  Where does the intersection of the city in which we live, work and go to school and the city constructed by media lie? To this end we will examine the intesection of tourist and fan as well as considering some of the existing literature on how we endue places with significance based on our experience of them in the media and the larger issues of making meaning on various levels often simultaneoulsly.

The second goal of this course involves engaging with yet another conceptualized "place" - the digital frontier. As R.E. Miller has observed: 'to compose successfully in the 21st century you have to not only excel at verbal expression and written expression, but you also have to excel in the use and manipulation of [still and moving] images' (2008). It has also been observed that 'what is traditionally thought of as writing has fundamentally changed. The nature of composition is much more complex and includes multimedia elements' (Ensslin and Slocombe, 2012). To this end we will be exploring the use of a variety of tools and approaches that facilitate digital composition and collaborative composition, above all asking ourselves what tools will most effectively allow us to tell layered and complex narratives about place, media and meaning.

References:

Ensslin, Astrid and Will Slocombe. (2012) 'Training humanities doctoral students in collaborative and digital multimedia." Arts and Humanities in Higher Education  11:140

Miller. R.E. (2008) 'The future is now' presentation Rutgers University, Newark N.J. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daqMDfBKuLU&list=PL540A39263755058D (accessed January 13, 2014).