Preface
Digital projects at a faculty level have adopted two strategies for publishing a website and a monograph simultaneously. Matthew F. Delmot’s The Nicest Kids in Town (University of California Press, 2012) was published by the University of California press as a physical monograph with a companion Scalar site. The website contained additional visual and photographic material that could not be represented in the print edition. The website does not represent all of the book content; instead, the digital companion summarizes Delmot's key arguments and digitally publishes close readings of additional visual material. Sean Silver’s The Mind is a Collection (UPenn Press, 2016) imagines a different relationship between the website and the monograph. Rather than see one form of publication as subservient to the other, Silver describes both as two outcomes of the same project. The custom-built website functions as a virtual museum of eighteenth-century cognitive models, and the monograph serves as a catalogue of this exhibition. While the digital exhibition received widespread acclaim, it was the publication that received the 2016 Kenshur Prize for its contribution to eighteenth-century studies.
The companion site (or in Silver’s case, the companion publication) is ideal for scholars pursuing tenure, for it makes the scholarly labor of the digital project legible to an audience most familiar with document-based scholarship. When I began writing this dissertation as a document in May 2015, there were few models of digital-born scholarship, particularly within tenure dossiers. Since then, the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association have been advocating for increasing flexibility in job evaluation materials in order to accommodate digital-born scholarship. This advocacy has resulted in robust frameworks for reviewing scholarly work, including the MLA’s “Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media” and the AHA’s “Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship By Historians.” Conversations about faculty scholarly labor have not only led to revised criteria for tenure but have also opened spaces for alternative forms of dissertations. In late 2015, George Mason University created guidelines for History and Art History digital dissertations that proposes structuring a sustained scholarly argument into a framing introduction, a series of "modules," bibliography, and a reflection on the project's development. The "module" functions as a unit of measure roughly equivalent to the chapter in a document-based dissertation. "Shining Lights" follows the practices laid out in GMU's rubric by segmenting my analysis into case studies. Rather than characterize these as "modules," I evoke the conventions of document-based scholarship by referring to these sections as "chapters" in order to convey their scope. The dissertation's concluding chapter describes the dissertation's development as well as its design, structure, and visual rhetoric, thereby situating the reflective component of the digital dissertation more centrally in its structure.
In this manner, "Shining Lights" joins a growing body of dissertations that experiment with form in order to support sustained scholarly analysis. For “Infinite Ulysses,” Amanda Visconti designed and built a digital edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses in order to test how the edition’s interface promoted social reading practices (University of Maryland, defended April 2015). Other web-based dissertations, particularly those that use Scalar, curate multimedia assets, including soundbites, photos, and videos. Dwayne Dixon’s “Endless Question” (Duke University, defended 2014) and Celeste Sharpe’s “They Need You!” (George Mason University, defended 2016) build cultural histories through heavily annotated visual material. Unlike the companion site model, these dissertations construct arguments made possible by their digital form. In addition to web-based expressions of research, this dissertation resonates with other graduate student projects that break with document-based scholarship in order to engage with the scholarly ecologies that they inhabit. Nick Sousanis’ comics dissertation and subsequent book, Unflattening (Teachers College, Columbia University, 2014; Harvard University Press, 2015), explores semiotics and epistimology through visually and textually shifting perspectives. Its design supports and advances the content of the prose. More recently, dissertations reflect on sonic material and their context by adopting sonic forms. A.D. Carson and Anna Williams analyze knowledge production through two genres. Carson's “Owning my Masters” (Clemson University, defended 2017) takes the form of a rap album to challenge previous scholarly approaches to hip hop, its historical context, and its representation in subsequent scholarship. Similarly, Anna William's "My Gothic Dissertation," presented in podcast form, reflects on her graduate school experience specifically and the current academic landscape more broadly through a comparison of current educational practices and those portrayed in gothic novels. In each of these cases, the dissertation’s argument emerged more naturally from the content thanks to formal affinities between the objects of analysis and the medium used to express their interpretation of that material. As you will see in this dissertation’s revision history, the move from document-based to web-based dissertation dramatically shifted the argument that this project makes. The website form of this dissertation parallels the visually-oriented nature of the magic lantern show, enabling a seamless presentation of audio-visual material alongside analytical prose. By placing form and technologies of mediation centrally in my exploration of nineteenth-century visual culture, I expose my own role as mediator in order to further investigate the misrepresentation of local audiences in nineteenth-century magic lantern shows. This focus on mediation animates the dissertation's narrative structure. While graduate students and faculty have used Scalar as a scholarly publishing platform, this dissertation represents the most extensive exploration of Scalar's multi-linear narrative capabilities. In addition to its primary path, the dissertation offers sustained, cross sectional studies of the technologies that shape our view of nineteenth-century events. The following introduction provides an overview of these paths while also situating the dissertation's content within the context of nineteenth-century magic lantern shows, the missionary movement, and relevant scholarship on these topics.
