Jerz > About > Dennis G. Jerz [ Professional Biography | Writing Handouts | Theater Resources ]

Dennis G. Jerz

Associate Professor English — New Media Journalism

Photo of the “Y2” rock, by Lynn Brucker, courtesy of the Cave Research Foundation

 

Seton Hill University Greensburg Pennsylvania

Contact Information

Background and Links

In 2003, I was hired to lead a brand new program in new media journalism. I’m told that it appears in the catalog as “Journalism New Media” because nobody would be able to find it if it were alphabetized under “N”.

• Jerz’s Literacy Weblog
  Since the spring of 1999, I have annotated web links on technology, humanities, cyberculture, journalism, academia, and everything else that makes my heart go thumpety-thump.
• Online Resource Room
  A large collection of instructional handouts, covering academic writing, electronic text, and technical writing. Popular pages include the MLA-style Bibliography Builder, and handouts on blurbs, e-mail, and usability testing.
• Interactive Fiction
  Interactive fiction requires the text-analysis skills of a literary scholar and the relentless puzzle-solving drive of a computer hacker. People tend to love it or hate it. Those who hate it sometimes say it makes them think too much.  The photo of the “Y2” rock shows a view of the real cave that inspired Will Crowther to write the classic 1970s computer game “Colossal Cave Adventure.”

Other Major Resources

• York Corpus Christi Pageant Simulator
• (R.U.R.) Rossum’s Universal Robots

Selected Research

• “Group Code Annotation: Colossal Cave Adventure.” Electronic Book Review. Proceedings of the Critical Code Studies Working Group. 2011.
• Kirschenbaum, Matt, Doug Reside, Neil Freistat, Jerome McDonough, and Dennis Jerz. “Twisty Little Passages Almost Alike: Applying the FRPR Model to a Classic Computer Game.” Digital Humanities Quarterly. 4:2  (2010). <http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/2/000089/000089.html>.
• Jerome McDonough, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Doug Reside, Neil Fraistat, Kari Kraus, Rachel Donahue, Dennis Jerz, Henry Lowood, Megan Winget. “Preserving Virtual Worlds: Models & Community.” Digital Humanities, University of Maryland, 2009.
• “Teacher Tapestries: Reflections on Teaching Blogging Over a Decade” College English Association, Pittsburgh, 2009.
• “Thinking Inside the Box: Free and Open Source Alternatives to CMS” Presentation for the workshop “Course Management Systems: A Viable Reality in the Composition Classroom” Conference on College Composition and Communication 2008.
• “Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original ‘Adventure’ in Code and in Kentucky” Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2007.
• Full Professional biography (C.V.)

Personal

Utterly pointless “Rainbow Hector Weblog“