(Begins March 28) Herman Melville’s novella “Benito Cereno,” a nineteenth-century story of mutiny at sea, is a duplicitous text. Somewhat in the manner of a detective story, Melville’s narrative raises questions about its design and its designs upon a reader. This class seeks to understand the text’s perils and pleasures by applying digital tools to the reading process. We will explore methods for deepening the reading experience, using a wide range of approaches:

1. Reading and annotating the text in MIT’s Annotation Studio
2. Fluid-text analysis: exploring and collating different versions—magazine and book publication, as well as different editions and formats
3. Comparison with source text, Amasa Delano’s A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, and other literary and historical sources
4. Marginalia: Melville’s manuscript annotations as critical tool
5. Text analysis using Voyant Tools to locate significant patterns
6. Digital research in MIT Libraries databases

Students will read and discuss texts intensively in class; practice using different digital platforms; post questions and responses in a class discussion forum; present an in-class report; and keep a portfolio of materials to submit at the end of the term. No technical expertise required.

Currently, the term “found footage” is perhaps most commonly understood as a sub-genre of the horror film – one that relies on supposedly “true” lost-and-found footage of hauntings, possessions, and other monstrosities to structure their nightmarish narratives (The Blair Witch Project; Paranormal Activity; Unfriended). By playing with audience expectations of authenticity and illusion, found footage horror encourages us to believe that the recovered and reassembled documentary, news, and/or home video footage we are seeing is “real” – making it all the more terrifying. While this seminar is indeed interested in examining the found footage horror genre formally and historically, it also uses it as a jumping off point to explore “found footage” for all its other linked and divergent possibilities. Missing, incomplete, damaged, destroyed, salvaged, remixed, recycled, and re-contextualized film and video structure and inform our moving image world; it is in these gaps, bits, pieces, collages, archives, and ephemera that this seminar takes interest. Over the course of the semester, this class will engage with the aesthetic, ideological, political, and historical implications of the following “lost and found footage”: documentaries and newsreels; early silent and Hollywood cinema; experimental and avant-garde films that make use of found footage; unreleased films; home movies; industrial and educational films; fictional found footage and “mockumentary;” underground and censored footage; and surveillance, webcam, and body-cam footage. In doing so, this seminar will address issues of film theory; cinematic heritage and preservation; film circulation and curation; physical and digital archives; re-appropriation; ownership and privacy; and of course realism and authenticity.