IX. Chapters
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Table 4 provides an overview of each chapter and major section's main argument.
Table 4: Chapter Overview
| Chapter | Description |
|---|---|
| About the Project | I introduce the project as a digital dissertation; offer readers several paths for navigating the various sections; highlight the rhetorical decisions behind the design; and reflect on the process of developing the interface. |
| Case Study Hub | I present my autoethnographic webtext drafts and contextualizing materials so readers can engage and explore these documents through the resources afforded by a digital dissertation environment. |
| Chapter 1: Introduction | My dissertation project investigates the relationship between material influences, invention, and design in making webtexts. Using digital autoethnography, discourse-based interviews, and composing case studies, I map out moments of invention in webtext projects’ designs (with attention to visual, linguistic, spatial, and audio channels), noting these moments’ correspondence with particular invention influences (in terms of people, tools, and metaphors). |
| Chapter 2: Digital Autoethnography | I trace the discussions around autoethnography as an approach to researching writing and digital composing, with a particular emphasis on its affordances for tracking the differences through which a webtext’s design is pulled--and for tracking these differences’ impacts on a webtext’s design as a knowledge-making artifact. |
| Chapter 3: Icon-Coding | I argue that scholars should value multiple modes at both analytical and representational levels when composing digital scholarship, thereby making use of all available rhetorical and epistemological resources. |
| Chapter 4: People | I suggest that investigating people’s impact on a webtext’s developing design (as a part of its overall performed argument) helps to highlight the social nature of a scholarly argument’s development in a particularly visible way and also furthers understanding of an important influence on how this inscape came into being in the first place. |
| Chapter 5: Tools | If webtext scholarship’s value lies in its potential to implicitly perform complex arguments through design, I argue that examining digital technologies’ abilities to influence design development is crucial for understanding webtexts’ rhetoricity. |
| Chapter 6: Metaphors | I argue that metaphor is a powerful invention strategy for webtext design that can both generate new ideas and obscure others in the pursuit of creating new knowledge. I suggest investigating metaphor helps open up possibilities for creating and organizing scholarly knowledge in both print and digital environments while recognizing the power these organizations have over the argument as it takes shape. |
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