eumaeus.github.io : courses home

FYW: Digital Reading & Digital Writing

Course Syllabus

Writing Assignment Overview

Assignments

(New assignments will be added to the top.)

1. For Monday, October 1. Write a list of bullet points you might like to make in a short presentation. If you need to look something up, do so, and make a note of what you looked up and where. If it is a scholarly article, try to use Zotero. Download and install Zotero and the Zotero Connector for your browser.¹

1. For Friday, September 28. Read the Wikipedia article on the Loeb Classical Library, down through the “History” part. Read this article by Emily Wilson about the Loeb Classical Library. Come to class ready to talk about these.

2. For Wednesday, September 26. Read carefully the Prefaces to both Plutarch, On the Bravery of Women and Cornelius Nepos, Lives of Eminent Commanders. Be prepared for a very short quiz on both, and to discuss them in class. (These are hard to read, and dense, but they are also short.)

3. For Monday, September 24. Look at Plutarch, On the Bravery of Women and Cornelius Nepos, Lives of Eminent Commanders. Don’t worry if much of the history / mythology is alien to you. From a reading of both (which can be quick) make a list of 5 chapters that you might like to work with, either 3 “Bravery of Women” and 2 “Commanders”, or 2 and 3, respectively; for each include a one-sentence statement of something interesting in the selection. Rank them in order of preference. Hand this in as a “short assignment”.

4. For Friday, September 21. Come into class with (a) Atom opened and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice loaded on your screen; (2) a Terminal open, in which you have done cd ~/Desktop/fall2018vm/fyw-scala/data and confirmed it with pwd or ls.

5. For Wednesday, September 19. Read the Wikipedia article on Cornelius Nepos. Come in ready to talk about the question: “Is this article helpful? Is it trustworthy?”

6. For Friday, September 14. Create a plain text file named insructions.md in fall2018vm/fyw/writing. Using the Atom text editor, paste the text of your (already written) instruction assignment into that file. Format it into headings, lists, and paragraphs using Markdown. Be able to preview it in Atom.

7. For Wednesday, September 12. Get VirtualBox and Vagrant. Clone the VM. Full instructions are at https://eumaeus.github.io/fall2018vm/.

8. For Monday, September 10. Read the (opinionated) essay“Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient,” Allin Cottrell. Write a five-sentence (no more, no fewer) summary of the article. Expect to read your summary aloud to the class.

9. For Friday, September 7. Rewrite your instructions, incorporating your classmates advice for improvements (or not). Hand in the first draft, perhaps marked up, and a new one. Windows users: Download and install the Git for Windows Installer; agree to all the default settings in the installer. Mac users: Locate the Terminal application that is on your computer, at /Applications/Utilities/Terminal; open it. Everyone: Download and install the Atom text editor https://atom.io. File for demonstrating a digital text link.

10. For Wednesday, September 5. Write a short set of instructions or recipe teaching a stranger how to do something—make a sandwich, make a milkshake, change a lightbulb. Bring this, typed out and printed, to class and be prepared to share it with your classmates. Keep the file on your computer in some place where you can find it; we will be working with this more in the future.

11. [Knowing Your Tools] For Friday, August 31: (a) Bring your computer to class. (b) Bring the following information, typed and printed on a piece of paper: first, the make and model of your computer, and second, the version of its operating system. Write this information as complete sentences, for example:

“I have a MacBook (Retina, 12 inch, 2017) laptop running macOS High Sierra (10.13.6).”

“I have a Dell Latitude E6480 laptop running Windows 10 Enterprise v.1803.”

Topics

Present Writing Topics and Skills

• Some basics: sentences, simple, compound, and complex. Connecting with “;”, “and”, “but”.
• Logical flow: “Old information → New information”; “broad → narrow”;
• Voice, tense, and mood.

Present Topics and Skills

• For-comprehension. Do something to everything in a list, without writing a loop.
• Method (myString.split("[.?!]")) vs. function ( betterSplit(myString,"[.?!]") )
• Version control: git
• Editions: Latin editio (ek-dare, “give out”), Greek διόρθωσις, diorthōsis (“thorough correction”)
  • Critical Edition: the editor decides among different versions.
  • Diplomatic Edition: the editor reproduces one version.
  • Variorum Edition: the editor presents multiple versions.
  • …
  • Digital Edition: an edition meant to be read digitally.
• “Technology” = applied science; ideas that are helpful.
• “Information technology”: the past 3,368 years.
• The Materialist Fallacy: Mistaking the tool for the job, or confusing the medium with the message. (cf. “metonymy”)
• Basic vocabulary: Text, Edition, Book
• Computational Vocabulary: machine, operating system, filesystem, directory/folder, application.
• File System: GUI
  • Hierarchical file system
  • Where is your stuff?
• Word Processor vs. Text Editor. WYSIWYG.
• Virtual Machines, what they are used for. “The Cloud” (i.e. “someone else’s computer”)

• Colon vs. Semi-colon.

  You need three things: courage, strength, and modesty. With these, you cannot fail; success is guaranteed.

• Version control with GitHub.

Topics (Future)

• Copyright (not the same thing as “patent”), Licenses, Public Domain, Fair Use
• Citation and Quotation
• Reading and Analysis

Skills

• Computational vocabulary: physical machine vs. virtual machine, host machine, guest machine.
• File System: Command-line
  • Hierarchical file system
  • Where is your stuff?
• Installing and running a Virtual Machine
• Basic Command Line skills:
  • pwd
  • ls
  • The meaning of /, ~, ., ../
  • cd …
  • less
• Text Editor vs. Word Processor
• Running a Linux Virtual machine

Assignments

(New assignments will be added to the top.)

1. Knowing your tools. For Friday, August 31: (a) Bring your computer to class. (b) Bring the following information, typed and printed on a piece of paper: first, the make and model of your computer, and second, the version of its operating system. Write this information as complete sentences, for example: “I have a MacBook (Retina, 12 inch, 2017) laptop running macOS High Sierra (10.13.6).”

Links

• Demo Paper
• Regular Expression Cheat Sheet
• CITE App
• CLI Basics
• “Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient,” Allin Cottrell
• The Atom text editor.
• Virtual Machine Image
• Plutarch, On the Bravery of Women
• Cornelius Nepos, Lives of Eminent Commanders
• SCOWL (Spell Checker Oriented Word Lists)

Reflection

The Furman Advantage cites “reflection” as a key component. In this class, “reflection” (which could mean anything), will mean “the ability to talk about what you have done in terms meaningful to people outside of the University”.

Linux is the operating system that hosts the information economy. Scientific research projects, the rendering of animated films, banking, manufacturing processes all tend to run on Linux because it is powerful, capable, and free to use and customize. As you work on Classics at Furman University, you will gain basic (and some not-so-basic) skills with Linux. A basic knowledge of Linux is a marketable skill. At the end of this course, you can add to your resumé: “Experience working with Linux (Ubuntu server, v.14) in a virtualized environment.”

Git is (in 2018) the standard distributed version control system in the world of information technology. Collaborative work on digital data will be ubiquitous across all professions in the future. At the end of this course, you can add to your resumé: “Experience working on a team-based data science project using Git and GitHub via the Linux command-line.”

1. Alas, Zotero no longer works with Safari. ↩