VII. Discussion

A. Motivate | B. Halt | C. Give | D. Inform | E. Suggest | F. Re-Envision

C. Give

Another kind of impact that people had on the invention of webtext design was providing new pieces to bring into the invention process, or “Give” as shorthand. I distinguish this facet from finding and repurposing materials created by other people, since that is understood here as an act of remix rather than of purposeful collaboration between two or more individuals. This “Give” impact aspect was seen most frequently in working with collaborators due to the nature of their investment in the project and because of the significant material, temporal, and intellectual investment needed to craft a contributing piece.

A “Give”-type impact tends to be enacted largely by collaborators in the autoethnographic reflection narratives. This pattern makes sense in light of a collaborator’s long-term engagement with and investment in the project. Creating pieces for the overall design invention process can be a significant investment of both time and intellectual labor in order to ensure that these pieces are well crafted, and also that they contribute coherently to the project’s goals. Credit as collaborator is one means of return for this investment, as well as a way to confirm that intellectual property rights are respected through full attribution. One example of a “Give”-type impact emerged from Draft DM1:

• Collaborator | Give | Media

In this case, the main pieces impacted were images and video, which then became the core around which the rest of the project’s pieces were developed. This draft emerged out of a collaborative working session during which I asked Kaustavi for media materials I could use to begin developing the web design for our project. As we were working, I found an image attachment in an email conversation between her and another collaborator on which I had been copied. I had seen this image posted on her social media page as well and thought it might work well for the project, but I wanted to wait and ask her permission before incorporating it into the invention process. With her permission, I began working with the image as the centerpiece for developing the project’s design. All original pieces for this webtext were generated by Kaustavi and her collaborators working on parallel projects. As the web developer for our webtext project, my main contribution at this stage was primarily to develop a webtext inscape—to take the pieces that they had created and finding a way to bring them together in order to communicate an implicit argument. In this situation, I relied entirely on my collaborators for media files in order to build the inscape around their ideas as closely as possible.

Another instance of a “Give”-type impact also emerged out of my collaboration with Kaustavi, this time in Draft DM4:

• Collaborator | Give | Text

The main pieces impacted were animation and text passages. Towards the end of the project’s initial web design phase, Kaustavi asked if there was a way to incorporate more animation into the project, so that motion was clearly the driving meaning-making channel and took precedence over language. Although Kaustavi did not directly provide the animation files later added to the project, she suggested the initial idea and provided a justification for it in relation to the overall design-as-argument in a way that I had never considered. As domain expert, Kaustavi also contributed significantly to the webtext’s textual content. It was her idea to include a glossary for Odissi-specific terms and concepts, for which she provided all the definitions. I also asked her to add a brief section to each of the video’s descriptive transcripts, as my own inexpert descriptions did not fully account for the dance movements’ nuances and cultural significance. These are but a few examples of textual contributions from Kaustavi that shaped the webtext’s design not only on a content level but also with regard to the overall design. As with the image and video files, I relied on her expertise to develop the alphabetic materials that would continue to flesh out and integrate the project’s design.

Although predominately collaborators enacted this kind of influence, I do want to draw attention to several instances in the Inventio and interview narratives in which “Give”-type impacts were enacted by non-collaborators. For example, Julia Voss mentioned in her interview narrative that she received a web file from collection editor Cindy Selfe to use as a template for developing her project. Likewise, Katherine Hanzalik paid a web developer to professionally realize her ideas for a webtext design. In both of these cases, the webtext composers received key pieces for their designs from individuals sympathetic to the project but without the long-term intellectual investment of a collaborator. These pieces received from other people were crucial to developing the project’s ultimate inscape; without these pieces, the webtext’s design would have turned out very differently—or perhaps even never have come into existence.