Since the first Pokémon game launched in Japan in 1996, the series has been a balancing act between casual and hardcore gaming. While the first iteration and “core” series has emphasized a modified, accessible version of traditional JRPG mechanics, other titles have frequently emphasized so-called casual play; most recently, Pokémon Go lured in a…[Read more]

An archaeological field research database that can be used for different projects poses an advanced technical problem. It does not only have to deal with different needs of a variety of disciplines and methods like excavation and survey but also be usable for architectural or object studies. Therefore, a generic data model is required that can…[Read more]

This undergraduate seminar on author Margaret Atwood fulfills the Major Author course at Stevenson University. Students will read A Trio of Tall Tales and The Year of the Flood, as well as both read and watch The Handmaid’s Tale. The course assignments include live-tweeting, creating a webtext, and an intertextual analysis essay.

Syllabus for ENGL 479P: BookLab, an upper-division undergraduate course at the University of Maryland. Taught with the resources and facilities of the Department of English’s BookLab, the course is a historical, imaginative, and experiential introduction to the multitudinous forms of what is not the oldest but is surely among the most enduring of…[Read more]

Seung-Hui Cho, the mass murderer who called himself Question Mark, left a lot of questions behind him. One of them obviously speaks for itself: what motivated him to kill thirty-three strangers at Virginia Tech? Another question almost goes without saying: why do we seek refuge behind moral explanations? Like ‘the question mark kid’ the adult…[Read more]

DTC 356 explores the cultural, aesthetic, and political roles of information and data. Beginning with library classification systems and Wikipedia, the course then turns to the role of metadata in organizing collections and our lives before ending with a consideration of text-mining and topic modeling. The conclusion considers these techniques in…[Read more]

Print-friendly remediation and backup copy of my course site for “Digital Public Humanities,” part of the Spring 2016 offerings in the Public Humanities MA program at Brown University. Course web site can be found here: http://digitalpublichumanities.jimmcgrath.us/. While not the first DH course offered at Brown or the first course in Public…[Read more]

PDF of syllabus for Brown University Leadership Institute course on media literacy. Course was taught over two weeks on Brown University campus in the summer of 2018. “Leadership” language and “Action Plan” part of Institute branding and course requirements. Syllabus may be of interest to students and instructors interested in high school /…[Read more]

Syllabus for the introductory course in UCF’s Texts & Technology PhD program. Builds on a previous iteration of the course taught by Mel Stanfill.

Syllabus for the introductory course in UCF’s Texts & Technology PhD program. Builds on a previous iteration of the course taught by Mel Stanfill.

Because it is all too easy to (accidentally) make assumptions about what first-year students know about language, in 2019-2020 my lit and comp type courses will begin with a segment on language, before moving on to sentences, paragraphs, and essays.

Our exploration of language will start by jumping into a story, to help us identify the 8 parts…[Read more]

This is the syllabus I’ve designed for my Fall 2019 undergraduate-level Introduction to Film course. I focused the course as a genre study of American horror films. I want my students to be able to consider the socio-political contexts of popular films and to detect and explain the arguments and worldviews produced by film.

This multilingual undergraduate translation workshop was co-taught in the Spring of 2014 with Prof. Norman Holland in the division of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Hampshire College. During the course, students were introduced to translation theory and explored key concepts through intralingual translation exercises before embarking on…[Read more]