Scholarly Research as Creative Practice

4.0 credits

This course is an introduction to scholarly research as creative practice, with an emphasis on multimodal forms of knowledge production in the digital sphere such as graphic design, data visualization, video essays and academic filmmaking, digital storytelling and art, website construction, user experience, podcasting, artificial intelligence, and other approaches. While we will consider scholarly research as creative practice across the arts and humanities, our emphasis will be on forms that engage the academic and aesthetic affordances of digital media and technology. How might a form such as the video essay allow humanists to work both creatively and critically at the same time? How might the principles of graphic design and practices of collage enable new styles of academic communication in both scholarly and non-scholarly contexts? Can we ethically and thoughtfully use artificial intelligence or visualization software both to produce and present knowledge to various publics? Students will explore answers to these questions not only through readings that theorize research as practice, but through exercises that build to a final project of their own that straddles scholarly research and creative practice.