I. Introduction

With a project of this nature, it can be difficult to draw the line between data and analysis. Multiple processes overlap: as webtext composer, I create multimodal scholarship; as researcher, I systematically examine my recorded composing data and present it to a scholarly community. These multiple layers of reflection enrich and reflect the holistic nature of multimodal scholarship, in which acts of making, documenting, analyzing, and reflecting are impossible to separate entirely. However, for the purposes of discussion, there comes a point in which clear lines need to be drawn between my role as autoethnographic subject and as researcher. This chapter documents the ways in which I drew those lines in order to generate working categories towards identifying salient material influences on webtext invention and design. First, I describe the challenges I encountered in analytically synthesizing collected data. I then narrate my process and rationale for establishing and developing an analytical method appropriate for examining the data I collected. In this chapter’s conclusion, I highlight implications of such an approach, especially for the ways it challenges assumptions about academic knowledge-making processes and expands resources for representing data. Ultimately, this chapter argues 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.

In emphasizing my experience of the data as autoethnographic composer, I seek to guide the reader backstage through that experience at key moments in the project’s development in order to see how the full structure came together to perform its unique, implicit design-as-argument. The codes and categories developed in the following chapters could be abstracted relatively easily and included in verbal summaries, perhaps with some visual summary via charts and tables. However, there are several reasons why I want to include these cumulative visual layers as part of the data and analytical process, and to invite the reader into the time-intensive process of working through them step by step, at the risk of potentially losing the readers’ attention or trying readers’ patience. In my closing section, I highlight the broader implications for the analytical approach I’ve developed in this chapter. I argue that a multimodal analytical approach can challenge assumptions about the verbal nature of analysis and interpretation. Additionally, I suggest that multimodal representation more effectively present changes in structural design across drafts at a glance and immerses the reader more completely in the contextualized data.