The Grid
Reflecting on strategies for digital remediation, particularly as I wrote my first digital-born chapter, helped me to picture the architecture of the digital space that I wanted to create. The turn to “archaeology” as a means to describe my approach to early screen culture also me a structure that would facilitate multiple paths through the dissertation’s material. My approach to knowledge design, much to my surprise, resonates with Kevin Flynn’s characterization of digital space as a grid.The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships, motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day I got in.[1]
Lines, Trees, and Rooms
Conceptualizing paths through materials—the freeways— exposes how a person experiences a website one page at a time. Some paths look like straight lines. Manifold, a digital publishing tool, is designed to publish monographs across multiple devices. Because it is designed to distribute prose via e-reader, pdf, and print, it privileges linearity to the point that the only way of moving through a sequence of webpages is forwards, backwards, or jumping to points along this line. It facilitates a fixed progression of pages. Some digital spaces are shaped like trees (or roots, depending on your perspective) that allow readers to choose which branch they would like to explore.Interactive fiction is a particularly evocative example of this kind of structure. The image above exposes the underlying paths that a story created with Twine can take.
The metaphor of the path breaks down when describing the architecture of digital exhibitions, for they tend to be more spatial than linear. Livingstone Online uses tiles to give a visitor an overview of its pages. Click here to see an example of this page layout. The photographic backgrounds function as portals through which to enter intellectual spaces that curate the digital objects hosted by the site. Kenneth Silver’s The Mind is a Collection is perhaps the most literal interpretation of a virtual museum in that it structures its subsections through rooms.
Of these structures, the digital exhibition offers the most optitive screen experience because if facilitates the most possible sequences of pages. As an early reflection on the process of digital remediation suggests, I wanted to create multiple paths through the material because this was a feature that was not possible in document-based research. In other words, I was looking for a structure that would empower readers to explore the material based on their own interests. However, this desire was at odds with the kind of intellectual labor that all dissertations are expected to perform. Regardless of the form that they take, they need to offer a sustained analysis of material. To borrow the vocabulary of Indiana University’s Graduate School Guidelines, a dissertation must perform “a logical connection between all components of the dissertation, and these must be integrated in a rational and coherent fashion.” Scalar’s interface enables an author to add keyword tags to a page so that they can be grouped thematically. The dissertation needed a more structured approach, one that would present multiple linear paths that advanced the dissertation’s overarching argument.
Stratigraphy as Structure
The dissertation’s intellectual turn towards an “archaeology of mediation” provided both the flexibility I craved and the rigidity I needed. The diagram below represents the dissertation’s underlying structure in spatial terms. As part of my knowledge design process, I often use wireframing and idea mapping to imagine what sequences of pages. During this phase of the process, I tend to use physical media to sketch and experiment before implementing these ideas in digital form. This tactile form of drafting refocuses my attention on website navigation as an embodied experience. In this manner, the sketch of the dissertation as an archaeology registers as a map that guided the ways that I built paths through the material.Organizing each chapter’s content by strata gave me two sustained ways of navigating the material. The first centered on case studies of missionaries who used lanterns while traveling abroad, represented as vertical columns. As a fellow mediator, I became part of these case studies. Each case study provides a core sample of lantern apparati, field-authored documents, and published accounts of lantern shows, excavating each layer as an archaeologist would perform a stratigraphy. These layers of mediating technologies became a second axis for subdividing the material in each chapter, resulting in a grid structure. Moving horizontally along this grid offers a different path through the material that examines one technology in four contexts.
