Reflection
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I built this dissertation interface with HTML, CSS, and Javascript in AptanaStudio3, an open-source web development application. I worked "from scratch" using self-developed code rather than templates or WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") applications. This process was important to me in developing a dissertation based on the claim that design is a form of argument; I wanted to be able to control every element on the interface, know why and how it was there, be able to articulate its contribution to the overall argument, and change it if need be. Javascript elements were copied and adapted from online tutorials; the lightbox elements use Javascript develoepd by Lokesh Dhakar. The timelines were developed with KnightLab's Timeline.JS open-source timeline software, and the fonts are imported via Google Fonts; all other files are locally stored for the purposes of sustainability. All images were drafted in PowerPoint and fine-tuned in Affinity Designer; the videos were compiled and edited in iMovie. I captured autoethnographic videos with a Zoom Q8 Handy Video Recorder and recorded screen recordings on my laptop with Quicktime.
I developed this interface between January and March 2018, after drafting a proto-version in September 2017. The icon-codes were drafted in June 2017, and continued to be revised through March 2018. All chapters were drafted between February 2017 and December 2017, and revised simultaneously with digital interface development. All typographical elements (block quotes, headings, journal and book titles) had been fully formatted in the Word doc versions. However, all these elements are refigured as plain text when entered into HMTL and need to be individually recoded. I will continue to work on textual formatting in preparation for the document’s final submission to OhioLink.
I acknowledge the risks involved in developing an argument via design for a digital dissertation, particularly in investing time to communicate an argument via channels (such as layout and navigation) typically less valued in academic discourse (Ball, Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). The significant time involved in creating the designs itself distracted from time that could have been spent in making the text itself more polished. This was a deliberate decision because this is work that needed to be done in order to fully develop my ideas and communicate the project as a whole to the reader as clearly as possible. In several cases I responded to committee feedback on chapter drafts via multimodal design elements, rather than necessarily in the explicitly articulated chapter drafts themselves. Future revisions will work to improve the alphabetic chapter’s linguistic craft in keeping with the total project’s multimodal elements. I will continue to fine-tune relationships between all components—including alphabetic sections—in working to more completely integrate all the various pieces of this dissertation webtext’s design.
Developing this project for a digital environment was a crucial component of pursuing my dissertation's intellectual work. Without the back-and-forth between Word documents and a digital interface, without knowing that there would be a space for richly incorporating multimodal data and analyses, this project could never have developed as it did. Delagrange recounts that in her experience, "It is impossible to overstate the role that creating the design, and spending time working with how and when to make things move, played in the development and refinement of my overall argument. Iterative manipulation of words and images and code were for me as productive of thought and discovery as the physical manipulation of objects in a Wunderkammer" (Delagrange 2009b, "Motion"). My experiences in developing this project reflected a similar process of inquiry through making. I was not able to fully begin engaging and interpreting my data with confidence until I began to make sense of the drafts as visual narratives; I did not fully understand what I was trying to do in my project until I was able to see all the various components together in an integrated space for the first time, in a way that a text document alone would not afford. I had to trust the project would come together in digital space, and to make the significant investment of time in developing a digital interface, before I fully knew whether that investment would pay off (and even now, I'm still not sure...)
But it had to be a digital dissertation. It took a different kind of time and intellectual energy than (I imagine) a traditional dissertation would have. But this form is what I needed to synthesize my ideas, to work through and make sense of this developing project in a way that I could communicate to an audience--in a way that I could create an epistemological space into which I could invite readers into this otherwise highly idiosyncratic autoethnographic data, and encourage them to engage the data in its native digital environment for themselves firsthand.
