Shining Lights: Magic Lanterns and the Missionary Movement, 1839—1868

Designing the Reading Experience

Transitioning from a document-based dissertation to a web-based one required developing new writing workflows and approaches to narrative structure. In the pages to follow, I situate my turn to web-based forms as an extension of the visual layout of lantern scholarship in print. The structure of the encyclopedia and the database, particularly as a way of preserving and presenting the lantern’s history, challenged me to think about forms that facilitate different paths through the material, including digital monographs, interactive fiction, and exhibitions. Framing the dissertation as an archaeology ultimately led me to stratigraphy as structure. Each chapter serves as a core sample in the ways that it excavates multiple layers of mediating technologies. Organizing web pages around a particular technology enabled me to construct alternate paths through the material that performed a sustained analysis of lantern apparati, field-authored documents, and published narratives across case studies.

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