IV. Chapter Conclusion

In the next chapters, I compare drafts to examine the distributed factors and forces behind a project’s generation at each stage via the notes and screen/video recordings. This approach highlights each project as a nexus of sociomaterial forces at one point in time, across layers of time, that exert agency as examples of scholarship-across-media based on their assembled design at a particular moment (Norman). I hope to highlight the various agential forces at work behind the end result of a webtext’s design-as-argument--in other words, to give some dimension and perspective to what went on behind the scenes so as to avoid any illusions that the end result (and its implicit argument) was unavoidable (Haas, Latour).

Moreover, the story of a project is not just about the project itself, but it is, rather, the story of a community and of networked material circumstances in rich detail. Stories centered in projects, such as Kairos’s Inventio narratives and other similar reflections on the making of webtexts, are already valued in the field of digital composing. I suggest that we need more stories in general about scholarship-across-media in order to understand the implications of their design as knowledge-making artifacts, and I offer these digital autoethnographic examples as one approach toward this end. As Takayoshi notes, “[T]here is currently little methodological guidance even for how to begin navigating the challenges of research design, field work, and analysis involving new media data. Very often, the innovative solutions adopted to address the challenges are not included in the report of research findings and conclusions” (3). It is my hope that this project can be a methodological model for scholars (like Boyd in the opening anecdote) looking to record and examine their own digital process and changes in drafts across time.