Week 1 (14 September):
Introduction
Resources
- Watch knowledge clips about WordPress (apologies for the audio quality):
- Installing (useful if you are interested in getting your own WordPress powered websites, but not necessary for your course activity)
- Posts (watch this before making your first post)
- Themes (useful if you are interested in getting your own WordPress powered websites, but not necessary for your course activity)
- Gutenberg WordPress Editor FAQ (wordpress.com, 2018)
- The History of WordPress (WPBeginner.com, 2018)
- Creative Commons Images for non-Copyright materials for your blogs. You can also try Google Image Search with Usage Rights, Wikimedia Commons, or Archive.org.
- Video on copyright by Youtuber Tom Scott
Read
NB here and below, “read”means before next class. In addition, unless hyperlinked, the texts can be found on Brightspace.
Here and below, “Fun” means it is an optional thing to do.
- Science Blogging: The Essential Guide
- Chapter 1 (Wilcox, 2016)
- Chapter 11 (Lillie, 2016)
Things to do
- Sign up for the course blog via digmedia.lucdh.nl/login,
- Use your Leiden e-mail!
- If you are not comfortable using your own name, you are allowed to use a pseudonym.
- familiarize yourself with the WordPress CMS Gutenberg editor
- Make sure you know how to create posts
- Learn about the Roles plugin (i.e. understand how you can control the visibility of your content)
- Write your first post! Make sure to add your group category in your post!
- Fun: Watch the Social Dilemma on Netflix.
Week 2 (21 September):
A Hyperfast History of the Digital
Resources
- Lecture slides can be found here.
Read
- Digital Media and Society, Chapter 1 (Lindgren 2017)
Things to do
- Get to know about the basic workings of the web through Part 1 of the Working with the Web tutorial.
- Fun:
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage comic.The comic website is currently broken, check back later 🙁
Week 3 (28 September):
The World Brain(drain)
Resources
- Lecture slides can be found here.
Read
- The Brain Organization of the Modern World, in H.G. Wells’ World Brain (1938).
- The Anatomy of a Search Engine (Brin and Page, 1998).
Things to do
- Set featured images on any posts you have made so far.
- Include at least one image, of which you have use rights, in your upcoming wordpress post. Not sure how? Check this.
- Fun:
- Watch Google and the World Brain documentary on Archive.org
- Browse some old websites at Archive.org
- Or browse this authentic 90’s flower website.
- Drop by during my Open Office hours (Thursday from 15:00-17:00; Veth 1.07) for a chat and to check out our Digital Lab and livestream/podcast studio.
Week 4 (5 October):
The Valley where Gold turned into Silicon (and back again)
Resources
- Lecture slides can be found here.
Read
- Silicon Valley Explained in Adam Fisher’s Valley of Genius
- Sillicon Valley by Christine Finn in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World
Things to do
- Familiarize yourself with HTML and WordPress’ Code Editor, through Part 2 of the Working with the Web tutorial. Try editing part of your post using WordPress’ html code editor.
- Fun:
- Learn how to make a podcast via the knowledge clips.
- Listen to some episodes of the Valley of Genius podcast.
- Inform yourself on the working conditions of the Chinese workers that built the Transcontinental Express.
- Read Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution or watch the documentary based on it.
- Check out the Hacker Quarterly or the MIT Gallery of Hacks
- Read about or watch the origin of “Information wants to be free”
- Happy Leids Ontzet! Stay safe, healthy and have fun!
Week 5 (12 October):
The Ego Online
- Lecture slides can be found here.
Read
- The I in Internet in Jia Tolentino’s (2019) Trick Mirror.
- ‘The Presentation of Self in the Online World’: Goffman and the study of online identities. Bullingham and Vasconcelos, 2013
Things to do
- Fun:
- Find out about the cool little magic of anchor links! Very useful if you want to or need to reference something in your post (e.g. a bibliographic entry) as a footnote.
- Learn a bit about making videos with the knowledge clips.
- Fun: We Live in Public (link to Full Documentary)
Week 6 (19 October):
The Platform Society
- Lecture slides can be found here.
- Original Instagram Research Decks, with annotations by Facebook can be found here and here.
- NB: Take care ♥ these items contain a discussion of and data on how Instagram affects mental health, including suicide and self-harm. Leiden University support for mental health and other well-being can be found here. Suicide prevention helpline: 113, or find help here online.
Read
- The Platformization of Cultural Production. Nieborg and Poell, 2018.
- Pick and read one (or more) of the chapters on Platform Communities
- Pearce and Artemesia’s Communities of Play
- Miller’s Tales from Facebook
- Burges and Green’s YouTube
- Gruzd et al.’s Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community
Things to do
- While your blogs are not the same as an academic paper, referencing is still very important. In fact, if a piece of information is not linked to (referenced), it does not exist on the web, so:
- Make sure you use urls to link to content online.
- If you have included references that are not online, but that you have listed at the bottom of your post, you can use the magic of anchor links to put in a link.
- If you made videos or podcasts, you can still use references, e.g. by putting a list of links in the descriptions of the video.
- Go back and check this is in order for all your content so far!
- Fun: Spend a day with an online community you love.
26 October: No Class
Things to do
- The ‘My Take-aways from the Course’-test is online on Brightspace from 18-30 October. Don’t forget to complete it as it is part of your final grade for this course.
- This is a good time to lay out a strategy for the remainder of your content production. It is also a good moment to get back and improve your previous blogs with your growing understanding of how WordPress works.
- Fun: Spend a day offline!
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