Description: Seminar, two hours; discussion, 90 minutes. Introduction to traditional and current thinking about materialities of texts, books, documents, and digital and print artifacts. Draws on conventional bibliography to introduce students to fundamentals of descriptive and analytic approaches, but also engages with theoretical positions derived from new theories in media archaeology, digital humanities, and legacy of structuralist, semiotic, and visual studies approaches. Identification and understanding of methods by which artifacts have been produced and thinking about implications of these for resituating artifacts within cultural, economic, and technological systems of value production. Letter grading.

Units: 4.0