Graduate Course Launches Aesthetics Website

Submitted by Ellwood Wiggins on

Professor Rick Gray's Fall 2012 graduate course, "Classical Aesthetics in the Digital Age," makes a splash with its new spin on the 'seminar paper.'  Instead of spending their energies and creative thinking on a lonely, dusty essay that ends up with a readership of two (the student writer and the professor), course participants have collaborated on an educational project which they invite the public to explore:

http://courses.washington.edu/asthetik/index.html

From the course description (accessible on the navigation bar on each student's page on the website):

"The seminar was organized as a “workshop” in which we supplemented the primary course materials by pursuing independent research projects focused on a theme, problem, or author. We cooperated in developing a shared intellectual project: the completion of a scholarly website on aesthetic theory. We tried to exploit the multimedia potentials of the digital medium as a vehicle for illuminating the history and theory of German contributions to the foundations of aesthetics. This project constitutes a kind of pedagogical experiment."

Time will tell if this new focus on digital humanities marks a new Copernican Revolution in academic thinking and practice, or if it simply offers an additional platform to represent and dessiminate ideas.

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