As I inquired about what existed in France, I quickly realized that cases were scarce, except for digital extensions of PhD theses (videos, interactive interfaces, etc.) playing as 'supplements' to the main text. In 2014, as far as I know, one of the only PhD theses defended in France to have been fully put online (not in PDF) was that of the philosopher Alexandre Monnin. Its *Philoweb.org* website (2013) has since been deactivated by its author for technical reasons related to the complexities of updates of WordPress and its CommentPress plugin. More generally, if online publication platforms like OpenEdition8 or Cairn9 (dedicated to books and articles and not to PhD theses) attend to readability, still their interfaces are difcult to modify. Similarly, self-hosting content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress or Lodel produce

7 Anthony Masure, 'Les versions numériques des thèses de doctorat' (November 9, 2017), *Anthony Masure*, http://www.anthonymasure.com/ conferences/2017-11-versions-numeriques-theses-doctorat

8 *OpenEdition*, http://books.openedition.org

9 *Cairn*, https://www.cairn-int.info/

'bloated' source code. They favor the use of predetermined templates, without any real creative work.

The unfortunate example of the technical problems at *Philoweb.org* overlaps with one of the arguments in my PhD thesis. Contemporary digital environments are mainly characterized by the industry of coding. This leads to a stack of unintelligible programs. It is therefore necessary to use, when possible, source code that we can master and understand. For these reasons, I chose to design my PhD thesis website without using a CMS. I wanted to establish a relationship between the technical structure and what I contend in the PhD thesis about the readability of the code. In the spirit of openness, all texts were placed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

This programming work (PHP/CSS/JS) began in July 2014, just after the PDF and printed versions were submitted. I started by 'cleaning' the source code generated from an HTML export from Adobe InDesign. The most laborious aspect was to check all the contents, accents, references, etc. I then built a simple and coherent reading interface with the printed version (same colors, font, etc.), which works at diferent screen resolutions, including mobile interfaces.  This control of the look and feel is very helpful for persons with visual impairments. Each subsection has its own URL, and can therefore be cited and indexed separately. A section of the website gathers some references collected after the PhD thesis. The jury was able to consult the online version before the defense (November 2014, four months after the submission of the print version), and highlighted its presence as an important element of the research. This website is, in my opinion, the 'true' version of the PhD thesis.

#### Transfer of Knowledge

This work is not intended to be replicated as it is: each researcher must defne what s/he is willing and able to do. For my part, I wanted to renew the PhD thesis reading experience. If we want to move standards that we consider obsolete, then we must try to open other paths. It is a matter of balance: if the design is too experimental, it could fail at legitimizing the method. For this reason, I wrote a foreword that included notes on the

Fig. 5 Masure, website http://www.softPhD.com, 2014, interface variations. Picture by Anthony Masure, http://www.softphd.com, CC BY-NC-SA.

Fig. 6 Masure, website http://www.softPhD.com, 2014, additional resources page. Picture by Anthony Masure, http://www.softphd.com, CC BY-NC-SA.

format for readers who do not necessarily grasp the stakes of graphic design.

The visual form has a very important didactic and is relevant for a teaching role, since it allows us to question how we address each other, how we show ourselves and what we show. The visual homogenization of most PhD theses makes them difcult to read for a broader public, which is in turn counter-productive if we wish to share knowledge. With a website, the presence of pictures and a little interactivity, access becomes easier and accessible to a wider audience. From the beginning, my ambition was to address interface designers and computer developers, an audience not used to reading academic texts. With a dedicated website, I could more easily make my PhD thesis appear in search engines.

In retrospect, this strategy has worked fairly well. The site is consulted approximately twenty times a day and the PDF has been downloaded more than 2000 times since it went online in 2014. This website allows me to easily fnd fragments, references, etc., for my own work or to send them to someone as a link. Contrary to what one might think, the fact that the PhD thesis is fully available online has not kept publishers from showing interest in my work. Indeed, making theses fully available online can be a distinct advantage, precisely because the feedback we get from readers can enrich the conversation. In this way, I subsequently published the essay *Design et humanités numériques*, 10 part of which is taken from the PhD thesis.

#### Future of Online Publishing

This work was defended in November 2014. With almost four years of hindsight, beyond the improvement of the consultation interface, a number of improvements seem relevant:

• To further complete the contents of the PhD thesis. In addition to supplementary content (videos, etc.), one could imagine an English translation, which could be achieved in a collaborative way.

10 Anthony Masure, *Design et humanités numériques* (Paris: B42, 2017).

#### Other Online PhD Theses Defended in France

Since my defense in 2014, some other cases of online PhD theses have appeared, which are important to mention:

• Saul Pandelakis' flm thesis, 'The Hero Who Came Undone: Representation of the Heroic Male Body in American Cinema 1978–2006', defended in 2013, was subsequently put online

11 Julien Taquet, 'Behind Paged.js' (July 22, 2018), *PagedMedia.org*, https://www. pagedmedia.org/pagedjs-sneak-peeks/

12 Antoine Fauchié, 'Un mémoire en dépôt' (April 3, 2018), *Quaternum.net*, https:// www.quaternum.net/2018/06/04/un-memoire-en-depot

13 *Distill*, https://distill.pub

on the GitBook service,14 itself based on the GitHub platform. GitBook uses Git protocol to manage diferent versions of the same document, to facilitate proofreading, etc. Making his PhD thesis available in a browser allows Pandelakis's thesis to be read more easily in fragments (the summary being displayed on the left), at any screen resolution.

Fig. 7 Pandelakis, 'The Hero Who Came Undone', PhD thesis, online version, 2016. Picture by Saul Pandelakis, https://piapandelakis.gitbooks. io/l-heroisme-contrarie/content

• Nolwenn Maudet's PhD thesis on the human-machine interface was put online shortly after its defense.15 Her PhD thesis was written entirely in HTML in a code editor (Sublime Text). It was then transformed into printable PDF via the HTML2Print tool developed by the designers of the Belgian Open Source Publishing collective.16 The online version ofers

14 Saul Pandelakis, 'L'héroïsme contrarié: formes du corps héroïque masculin dans le cinéma américain 1978–2006', (PhD dissertation, University Paris 3, 2016), https:// piapandelakis.gitbooks.io/l-heroisme-contrarie/content/; *GitBook*, https://www. gitbook.com

15 Nolwenn Maudet, 'Designing Design Tools' (PhD dissertation, University Paris-Saclay, 2017), https://designing-design-tools.nolwennmaudet.com/

16 Open Source Publishing, 'HTML2Print' (2014), http://osp.kitchen/tools/ html2print

Fig. 8 Maudet, 'Designing Design Tools', 2017, design process. Picture by Nolwenn Maudet, https://designing-design-tools.nolwennmaudet.com/, CC BY-NC-SA.

Fig. 9 Maudet, 'Designing Design Tools', 2017, design process. Picture by Nolwenn Maudet, https://designing-design-tools.nolwennmaudet.com/, CC BY-NC-SA.

a carefully edited interface, visible in both the work on the navigation menu, type (Spectral, Production Type foundry) and the management of pictures, references, or hypertext links. The texts are released under CC BY-NC-SA license.

• The only other example to date is currently being created by Robin de Mourat, a doctoral student in design. His PhD thesis on academic publication formats (2013–), is currently being prepared at University of Rennes 2 under the supervision of Nicolas Thély (professor in digital art, aesthetics and humanities). Robin de Mourat has developed a writing tool, Peritext, that allows scientifc resources to be arranged in a modular and semantic way. His PhD thesis will thus be put online using Peritext.

Fig. 10 Robin de Mourat, 'Peritext Program', 2017. Picture by Robin de Mourat, https://peritext.github.io/, CC BY-SA.n

These three examples collectively incorporate many of the improvements I suggested. They show that online PhD theses are far from being constructed using fxed approaches. They take many forms depending on the subject and technological advances.17 It is striking to note that the

17 HASTAC, 'Workshop: What is a Dissertation? New Models, Methods and Media', *HASTAC*, http://bit.ly/remixthediss-models

rare examples of online PhD theses defended in France are the initiative of people claiming to belong to the felds of art and design. We hope that these initiatives will be able to fnd extensions in other academic disciplines so that the knowledge produced during PhD theses can reach a wider audience. The Web shows that there is a diference between what is published (and which can remain confdential) and what is public (which can be easily read, shared, etc.).

#### Towards New Frontiers for the PhD

Beyond the transmission and valorization of knowledge, online PhD theses raise the question of PhD theses frontiers and research methodologies. Digital technologies introduce new paradigms that modify the very notion of writing. This begs the question as to why most researchers keep on using Word,18 even though this proprietary word processing software is not adapted to scientifc requirements and contemporary digital culture. With his team, literature researcher Marcello Vitali-Rosati developed the free software Stylo.19 Stylo is a markdown semantic text editor adapted to the humanities and social sciences to generate both printed and online documents. This kind of approach makes it possible to rethink the place of writing in intellectual activity: the 'tools' of writing are never neutral and strongly engage what is produced.

Online PhD theses also question the boundaries of the PhD. While in France the debates on research-creation are multiplying, they will also have to be helped by refections on the future of the PhD. The text should remain the central element of knowledge building. But how can the PhD theses also integrate, in addition to pictures, other modes of expression that are not considered simple 'annexes'? How to evaluate PhD theses that modify norms and habits? The evaluation of such practices will undoubtedly require the development of new criteria for assessment and legitimization. While waiting for the latter, doctoral

18 Marcello Vitali-Rosati, 'Les chercheurs en SHS savent-ils écrire?' (March 11, 2018), *The Conversation*, https://theconversation.com/les-chercheurs-en-shs-savent-ilsecrire-93024

19 Marcello Vitali-Rosati, 'Stylo : un éditeur de texte pour les sciences humaines et sociales' (June 3, 2018), *Sens-public.org*, http://blog.sens-public.org/marcello vitalirosati/stylo

students engaging in this type of approach will therefore have to equip themselves with teaching skills and didactics to make the value of their work understood.

The projects analyzed in this chapter show that taking digital culture and web languages into account can help to renew PhD theses. The editorial process of constructing a PhD thesis would therefore beneft from anticipating knowledge transfer. We would then join the initial ambition of the Web, namely a library of scientifc documents thought of as a social movement rather than as a technical prowess.20 The sharing of the computing capacities of machines had made it possible, something unexpected at the time, to gather and transfer knowledge on a global scale. Increasingly threatened by the pressures of capitalism, the defense of this 'free culture' should be the main challenge of academic research.

#### Bibliography

20 Tim Berners-Lee, *Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web* (New York: Harper Collins, 1999).

Masure, Anthony, *Design et humanités numériques* (Paris: B42, 2017).

# 13. Writing a Dissertation with Images, Sounds and Movements:

Cinematic Bricolage

*Lena Redman*

#### Backdrop to the Study

In presenting the overview of my doctoral thesis, in this chapter, I focus on *cinematic bricolage* as methodology for the generation, analysis and making meaning of research data. Cinematic bricolage methodology is characterized by the employment of heterogeneous tools and materials that are at hand, as well as by a multimodal system of representing the development of meaning.

In this chapter, I outline the methodology of cinematic bricolage with the use of alphabetic text and infographics. My point here is not to demonstrate my skills as a graphic artist that perhaps give me some advantage in presenting knowledge in an attractive way, and which might be deemed as nonessential. The infographics that I use here are not created to illustrate what is already articulated with words. Their presence here is my argument about the thought embodied in a particular form also being shaped by this form. The infographics—or any other digital mode(s) of expression chosen by the individual—and alphabetic text are two concentric rings of the same ripple, so to speak, that push at and are pushed by each other, resulting in the production of meaning through a continuous expansion of thought.

Fig. 1 *Writing with infographics and alphabetic text as the concentric rings of a ripple*, Lena Redman (August, 2019).

In this view, this chapter can be characterized as *writing with infographics*  and *alphabetic text*.

The correlation between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions in the production of meaning within Michael Halliday's framework of *systemic-functional linguistics (SFL)*, served as a departure platform for the study.1 The paradigmatic dimension is conceptualized as a system of signs and signifers.

Fig. 2 *Paradigmatic organization of linguistic signs*, Lena Redman (October, 2020).

The paradigmatic dimension is a set of variables that is composed in 'systemic patterns of choice'—syntagmatic structure, produces meaning.2 The encrypted interplay between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions constitutes a semiotic system which allows the content of mind to be transferred into an embodied form.

1 Michael A. K. Halliday, *Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar* (New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2014).

2 Ibid., loc. 897.

Fig. 3 *Syntagmatic organization of linguistic signs*, Lena Redman (October, 2020).

'Any set of alternatives, together with its conditions of entry, constitutes a system in this technical sense', Halliday maintains.3 In translating the semiotic system of language as conceptualized by Halliday into a semiotics of digital multimodality, the paradigmatic 'set of alternatives' is associated with database elements.

Fig. 4 *Paradigmatic dimension of multimodal representation: database*, Lena Redman (October, 2020).

'Syntagmatic ordering in language'—that is, 'conditions of entry' in Halliday's words—in digital multimodality is correlated with the cultural phenomenon of *deep remixability*. 4 This is a 'condition in which everything (not just the content of diferent media but also

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

languages, techniques, metaphors, interfaces, etc.) can be remixed with everything'.5

Deep remixability is achieved with the new *afordances* of digital media among which *modularity* plays one of the central roles in representational practices. In the context of digital dissertations, modularity undoubtedly deserves more attention as a facilitator of a wide scope of possibilities. Modularity is identifed as the 'fractal structure of new media'.6 It allows for an independence of the parts within digital objects in assemblages. This means that the textual composition, when split into fractal elements and reconstructed as multimodal assemblages, may represent a new segment in the process of codifying systems of transferring an abstract idea into material form.

At the moment, the afordances of digital media permit little more than theorizing about the possibilities of writing with images, sounds and movements in the production of digital dissertations and for general knowledge-construction practices. Thus far, there is no suitable platform that could facilitate user-friendly, widespread engagement of intuitive remixing of text with other representational modalities without prior training in design and the use of specialized creative software. Coming as I do from the feld of professional design, the recognition of the sharp dissonance between the possibilities that digital media ofer for production of knowledge and their downright limited use in scholarly practice became the main point of concern for my dissertation.

To this end, the rationale for establishing an intuitive digital space where the dynamic embodiment of the contents of a mind with the involvement of signifying multimodal strategies by a scholar or student has frst to be justifed. In other words, do we really need such a thing as multimodality in writing doctoral or any other scholarly papers? Or is it just the sheer availability of new afordances that encourages trendy tendencies to experiment with the cutting-edge technology?

In the present chapter I would like to give a few examples where I felt I would not have arrived at certain insights without the employment of multimodal semiotics. But I can't do this without briefy discussing

5 Vito Campanelli, 'Toward a Remix Culture: An Existential Perspective', in *The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies*, ed. by Eduardo Navas et al. (New York: Taylor & Frances Group, 2015), pp. 68–82 (p. 73).

6 Lev Manovich, *The Language of New Media* (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), p. 30.

Fig. 5 *Fractal structure of new media allows 'deep remixability' of syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions in making meaning*, Lena Redman (October, 2020).

three theoretical aspects which, in interplay with digital media, establish the merit of multimodal methodologies in generating, analyzing and presenting research data. These aspects are: *privatized knowledge tools, cinematic writing* and *cinematic bricolage*.

#### Privatized Knowledge Tools

It is sensible to assume that all contemporary dissertations are digital. To gain access to the global knowledge emporium—that is, to achieve an internationally afrmative evaluation of produced scholarship and

thereby acquire an endorsement for its academic circulation—a modern dissertation cannot be anything but digital. As a rule, it should be written in Microsoft Word, presented with PowerPoint, Keynote or Prezi. Its literature review, for the most part, is based on articles retrieved from the internet and eBooks. The discussions and negotiations around the dissertation are often conducted online. This system can be termed *a mainstream digital approach*.

Even though said system makes a solid basis for a modern dissertation to be considered digital, the ontological potential of representational modes and the production of knowledge aforded by digital media remain widely unexplored. As Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore wrote: 'We approach the new with the psychological conditioning and sensory responses to the old'.7 In the overwhelming 'totality' of digital environments, 'we attach ourselves to the objects, to the favor of the most recent past' that is, to word-based methodologies, time-approved by traditional academic conventions.8

By virtue of inheriting a digital environment—even though many of us are labelled by Marc Pensky's catchphrase as being not 'natives' but 'digital immigrants'9 —we 'pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps' to become one with the environment.10 One of the strings in this 'pulling up by the bootstraps' mode of living is striving for the existing media, using McLuhanese, to become 'an extension of man'. Media, as McLuhan and Fiore wrote, 'are so pervasive […] that they leave no part of us untouched, unafected, unaltered'.11

Having the *privatized knowledge tools* literally in their hands, pockets, bags or in front of their eyes and on their desks, the knower is no longer limited by the knowledge collected and prescribed to them by someone else. The *privatization of knowledge tools* enables the knower to create their own path in the quest for intellectual expansion in accordance with their individual interests, capacities and personal experiences.

7 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, *The Medium is the Message* (Corte Madera: Gingko Press, 1967), p. 94.

8 Ibid., p. 74.

9 Marc Pensky, 'Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants', *On the Horizon*, 9.5 (2001), 1–6, https://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20 Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf

10 Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, *The Tree of Knowledge* (Boston: Shambhala, 1998), pp. 46–47.

11 McLuhan and Fiore, *The Medium is the Message*, p. 26.

Reaching out for the construction of individualized forms of knowledge, the knower, for the frst time in history, is aforded an opportunity to reconnect his/her interests with their immediate natural– sociocultural environments, expand and explore this reconnection through a diverse network of cultural resources, and distill the essence of their fndings through the expressions of individually and endlessly *hybridized variations*.

Fig. 6 Extension of self-presence in the world by means of digital media, Lena Redman (May, 2016).

#### Cinematic Writing

The emerging genre, as I saw it, *writing with images, sounds and movements*, has a direct link to the term 'cinematography', as explained by Ed Sikov.12 *Cinematography* originates from two Greek words 'kinesis (the root of *cinema*), meaning movement, and *grapho*, which means to write or record'. Therefore, Sikov suggested, '*Writing with movement*

12 Ed Sikov, *Film Studies: An Introduction* (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

*and light*—[is] a great way to begin to think about the cinematographic content of motion pictures'.13 In the same vein, *writing with images, sounds and movements* can be termed *cinematic writing*.

In this I fnd a parallel between the call for an innovative use of the afordances of contemporary digital media—and, in particular, cinematic writing as one of the possible systemic manifestations for knowledgeproduction—and the invitation to see cinema as an avant-garde means of expression, as suggested by Alexandre Astruc in 1948. 'I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of camera-stylo (camera-pen)', wrote Astruc in his persuasive essay 'The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo'.14

'A Descartes of today', Astruc went on, 'would already have shut himself up in his bedroom with a 16mm camera and some flm, and would be writing his philosophy on flm […] of such a kind that only the cinema could express it satisfactorily.' Cinema, according to Astruc, was progressively transforming into a language by which a producer could externalize a meaning 'as he does in the contemporary essay or novel'.15 Astruc's article was a celebration of the technological potential of cinema to become an expression of an individual mind's most private thoughts—shutting yourself up in your bedroom and responding to the feeting moments of reality—something that could be conveyed only through the clusters of moving light and shapes entangled in the ever-present intricacy of sounds. Astruc rejoiced in the discovery of a new system of signifcation, where, as I see it, one mode of expression is just an uttered note, but the cluster of them is a philosophical poem of revealed consciousness.

The process of 'revealing consciousness' by means of merging logic and aesthetics, that is, transitioning from 'mind-cinema' by framing the abstract-implicit into the digital-explicit, became a core point of my study. In that regard, it was important to determine the boundary between the abstract thought and its material manifestation. What exactly is this space through which the transition takes place?

In searching for answers, the analogy of a blind man with a stick, suggested by Gregory Bateson, galvanized my imagination. 'Where

15 Ibid.

13 Ibid., loc. 953.

14 Alexandre Astruc, 'The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: Le Caméra-Stylo', *New Wave Film.com*, http://www.newwaveflm.com/about/camera-stylo-astruc.shtml

does the blind man's self begin?' asked Bateson. 'At the tip of the stick? At the handle of the stick? Or at some point halfway up the stick?'16 The stick, Bateson decided, is a transmitter through which information about the pathway is being continuously broadcast into the man's mind. The man's touching the pathway with the tip of the stick is the primary channel for collecting and transmitting data. The sound that the touch produces, and the sounds, smells and general feelings coming from the surroundings, constitute complementary data-gathering. The senses are engaged in an ongoing collaboration, resulting in a 'systemic circuit' that runs through the stick, maps the pathway in the man's mind, like a movie projector, and reveals new cinema frames associated with each new step that 'determines the blind man's locomotion'.17

Fig. 7 *A looping feedback produced by the blind man's walking stick touching a pathway and his 'mind-cinema', determining his locomotion,* Lena Redman (April, 2019).

The man, the stick and the pathway, together, are 'a self-corrective unit'.18 The man's every next step is the result of continuous feedback looping

16 Gregory Bateson, *Steps to an Ecology of Mind* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 318.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., p. 319.

between the information received through the sensory circuit and the mind-cinema playing in his head. This network is not confned by the contours of the head or the body but includes the pathway and the stick through which the information travels, as well as the surroundings, and that is what determines the next move.

Translating this into a meaning-making activity, we can say that every data-organizational and representational move of gathered and analyzed data creates a circuit towards meaning-clarifcation; and every cleared segment of meaning afects the next step in the organization and representation of data. In other words, the process of ideation is achieved by step-by-step progressive unfolding—a circuit of gathered and analyzed data and self-correcting/self-organizing feedback loops.

Fig. 8 *Continuous feedback looping between gathering/analyzing data and organizing and representing the process of analysis*, Lena Redman (April, 2019).

This can be reduced to a formula where gathering and analyzing data, positioned in feedback circuits with organizing data and representing the processes of analysis, leads to meaning-making:

Fig. 9 *Symbolic representation of the feedback loops between gathering/analyzing data and its organizing/representing that leads to construction of meaning*, Lena Redman (April, 2019).

So, in what ways has this equation afected my epistemological quest?

#### Cinematic Bricolage

The equation *GA < > OR >>> MM*—that is, the *Gathering and Analyzing* < > *Organizing and Representing* circuit resulting in the step-by-step production of *Meaning-Making*—gave rise to a question: to what degree does such an approach allow the exploration of the metacognitive function of mind that results in the construction of new knowledge?

The complexity and number of theoretical underpinnings—the structural functionality of semiotics, cinematic writing, the privatization of the means of knowledge production, media as extension of man, and deep remixability—necessitated the imposition of structural clarity, which I found in the adoption of Lévi-Strauss's research methodology that 'is commonly called "bricolage" in French'.19 The bricoleur, Lévi-Strauss notes, 'has no precise equivalent in English'. She/he is 'a kind of professional do-it-yourself' person who 'uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman'.20

The bricoleur mode of operation difers from the engineer's practice. The engineer establishes a question and fnds a solution in a planned sequence.

The bricoleur, according to Lévi-Strauss, explores 'the heterogeneous objects of which his treasury is composed to discover what each of them could "signify" and so contribute to the defnition of a set which has yet to materialize'.21 In the context of my dissertation, the 'set that has yet to

19 Claude Lévi Strauss, *The Savage Mind*, trans. by George Weidenfeld (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 16.

20 Ibid., p. 17.

21 Ibid., p. 18.

materialize' was an anticipated cluster of insights as to how multimodal semiotics can afect an epistemological progression.

Fig. 10 *Seeing hetero-geneous objects as 'op-erators' in constructing meaning with diverse means*, Lena Redman (December, 2016).

To this end, I decided to explore the representational process of my childhood memories of growing up in Soviet Russia. How do the reorganization of old photographs, objects of personal sentimental value, memories, songs, music, movies from childhood, old video clips from YouTube and other fragments of data organized in a deep remixability technique infuence knowledge-related discoveries?

Using multimodality as a 'blind man's walking stick' what would I fnd that I didn't know before and perhaps wouldn't have found if I didn't use multimodal tools?

Bricolage is an activity that is subject to the given context and a 'universe of instruments [that] is closed'. The game is 'always to make do with "whatever is at hand"'. Accordingly, the bricoleur's toolbox

Fig. 11 *'Discovering' my own past by representing it with the existing objects and memories*, Lena Redman (February, 2016).

and the availability of materials are limited. At the same time, the scope of the tools and materials is heterogeneous in the sense that it is 'the contingent result of all the occasions'. In other words, in examining the use of digital media to write a dissertation, my digital toolbox—mobile phone, iPad, computer and the internet—was limited in the sense that these tools were not specifcally designed for my exact area of study, but their utility was based on the principle that 'they may always come in handy'.22 At the same time, my set of tools enabled a wide scope of representational heterogeneity.

Fig. 12 *A slide-show of some pages from the thesis written with images, sounds and movements in an ePub format*, Lena Redman (February, 2019).

Each page was a composition of multimodal components. Objects appeared and moved in the spaces allocated for them—across the page, behind the text or between the lines; sounds came out, video elements emerged and new text boxes materialized. The focus of analysis was adjusted not so much according to the reception of multimodal compositions by the reader, but rather according to how the engagement with various modes of representation afected the knowledge-producer's cognitive activity.

To avoid communicational complexity, I categorized photographs, scans and other images, music, songs and other database elements, as *bricoles*. Each of the bricoles, borrowing from Lévi-Strauss, 'represent[s] a set of actual and possible relations: they are "operators"'.23

What should I expect of the operational functionality of the bricoles in conditions of deep remixability where they are deconstructed and reconstructed in the interplay with other fragments of other bricoles in completely new assemblages?

#### Gathering / Analyzing < > Organizing / Representing >>> Meaning-Making

#### Looking for Crows

The implementation of multimodal remixes allowed me to notice things that, I believe, would usually be ignored. These were feeting sensorial moments of a suddenly remembered smell or taste; movements or feelings that my mind produced in response to the awakening of memories. The question emerged: why, when remembering diferent episodes from my Soviet childhood, did sensorial manifestations images of crow(s), creeping movements of pipe or cigarette smoke, smells of heavy coats wet from thawing snow—make their sometimes clear, sometimes vague, but nevertheless persistent appearances on the 'screen' of my 'mind-cinema', as if the whole fabric of the screen was woven out of their meaningful relevance?

What if I integrate an animated crow fying behind the typed text and apply the sound of its cawing, mimicking its presence interwoven into my thoughts? How would the conversion of the implicit into the visible and auditory afect the process of meaning-making? Why does it make me 'hear' the Beatles singing:

> Blackbird singing in the dead of night Take these broken wings and learn to fy…?

I observed very attentively my mind-cinema responding to my activity working with the multimodal bricoles. I used my mobile phone for taking pictures, and at this stage of the project, crows became my models. I recorded various sounds, and crows' cawing caught my interest. Integrating recorded bits into the pages of writing, I thought that the fact that one of the sound recordings also contained the sound of a random car braking was interesting. I didn't discard it but instead added an image of a car and also incorporated The Beatles' 'Blackbird' song in the background. I tried to avoid elitist thoughts, attempting to block nothing that appeared important even if it seemed nonsensical.

Fig. 13 *Connecting the dots of associations, memories and newly collected information*, Lena Redman (August, 2016).

A 'whirl of catching and being caught', Tim Ingold wrote in his philosophically-poetical *The Life of Lines*. 24 In trying to catch meaning, the meaning 'catches you in your own mind'—that's how I felt in allowing my thoughts taking digital form.

I observed the dynamic circuit as working on the written text inspired the generation of certain images, movements and sounds, and the generation, categorization, curation, and their manipulation infuenced alterations in the written text which, in turn, resulted in gaining insights. It allowed me to immerse myself in the depth of memory where some foating fragments were clipped back into their right places, like disembodied bits of jigsaw puzzles.

24 Tim Ingold, *The Life of Lines* (New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2015), p. 7.

Catching the meaning of the profound sadness of the crow's presence, I understood that it had a deep-rooted cultural signifcance. The 'black crow' was the term for a vehicle (GAZ M-1) that, during Stalin's time, took people to places of no return. Although the 'black crow' van ceased to exist in the time of my childhood, the term was prominently embedded into cultural representations in movies, books and stories. In my child-mind, the term acquired the literal representation of a bird—a crow.

#### Smoke Screen

Not less revealing and equally gloomy was the revelation of cultural symbolism in the image of pipe smoke. The sluggishly moving streams spreading behind the layer of typed text were 'catching' something obscure but exceedingly disturbing. 'Being caught' in looking for images of Stalin's 'black crow' van, I became intrigued by the images of Stalin himself and especially by the fact that he was quite often photographed smoking a pipe. There was such an air of signifcance around the whole thing that it made me even more curious. I started looking for more images and information on the topic.

In Graeme Gill, I read about Victor Deni's illustration that was reproduced in the central Soviet newspaper *Pravda* (1939), where the generals of the White Guard are shown 'being blown away by the smoke of Stalin's pipe'.25

I was bewildered by the doctrinal incongruousness of the image. The whole country was heavily conditioned by the Marxist ideology of radical materialism. And here we had the 'Father of the Nation' being portrayed as a magician blowing out some sort of spell on the generals.

But the more images I saw and the more I read about Stalin, the more I came to understand that despite Soviet ideology never tolerating anything supernatural, Stalin himself was portrayed as having superhuman abilities.

It came into focus that Stalin's pipe was actually one of the visual symbols endowing him with 'supernatural power' as he kept brutal control of the country with a population of more than one hundred

25 Graeme Gill, *Symbols and Legitimacy in Soviet Politics* (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 301.

Fig. 14 *Making connections between the crows and pipe smoke*, Lena Redman (May, 2016).

million at the time. In his historical novel about Stalin, Richard Lourie depicts him as an egocentric dictator for whom the quality of a taste of smoke on his tongue would determine the destinies of thousands of people and their families.26

The movement in this case, as a mode of representation, was that functional aspect that Lévi-Strauss described as an operator that carried in itself possible relations in recognition of meaning. The pipe smoke mediated Stalin's personality, shrouded in secrecy and ultimate distrust of anyone, and his stealthily well-calculated actions. Not the smoke itself, but its spreading, its continuous thickening, represented heavy oppression and lack of air to breathe for anyone who found themselves under that stealthily moving cloud. Stalin's style of moving and speaking was slow, like his pipe's smoke spreading far away around the whole country, screening the truth and making the cruel lie appear to be a necessity for survival. Like a spider who catches its victims with a hidden web, Stalin dispersed his manipulative smoky nets all over Russia and kept it tight in those nets for years.

#### Bringing Forth the World Together with Others

The most heartfelt discovery that my multimodal probe provided me with was the epistemological aspect which Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela described as 'the world that we bring forth with others'. In other words, every act of knowing 'is a structural dance in the choreography of coexistence' with others.27 To discuss this, I use an ongoing incorporation of—what I felt was the 'appropriate' representation—Beatles songs into the bricolage of probes. While assembling animations to represent my imaginary meeting with 'the fathers of communism', and in particular with Lenin, I felt that juxtaposing the 'Internationale' performed in German and The Beatles' 'Strawberry Fields Forever' was an absolutely right choice in depicting the contrast.

26 Richard Lourie, *The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin: A Novel* (Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, 2000).

27 Maturana and Varela, *The Tree of Knowledge*, p. 248.

Fig. 15 *Imaginary meeting with the fathers of communism*, Lena Redman (May, 2015).

My intention was to create the sense of a collision by using my childhood's most innocent and happiest moments that, in my particular case, can be metaphorically expressed with the digital 'strokes' portraying a garden, a clear sky, the buzzing of bees and futtering of butterfies, the fragrance of strawberries ripening in the sun. On the other hand was the harsh austerity and hidden cruelty of Soviet reality. The 'Internationale' sung in German is a refection of Lenin's 'specifc admiration for Germany that was enormous'.28 Lenin was raised by a mother who was of German and Swedish ancestry and who stayed loyal

28 Robert Service, *Lenin: A Biography* (London: Pan Macmillan, 2002), loc. 252.

Fig. 16 *Sanctification of Lenin by the use of fear and oppression*, Lena Redman (April, 2016).

to German cultural traditions.29 Lenin also lived for a long period of time in Germany and liked the culture. 'He wanted the West too to change. There had to be a European socialist revolution that would sweep away the whole capitalist order'.30 Lenin appears not to have been very fond

29 Ibid., loc. 496.

30 Ibid., loc. 252.

of Russians, who in his opinion, are talented people but 'have a lazy mentality'.31 The 'Internationale' performed in German sounds to me like the reverberation of Lenin's ultimate goal, in which Russians 'were sorry specimens that populated the corrupt world'32 and were used as disposable material for the frst trial of a larger and more important world scheme.

The images of smashed strawberries, sounds of a battle, and together with them the song 'Strawberry Fields Forever' from the movie *Across the Universe*, 33 which is based on The Beatles' songs, came to my mind as a concrete thread to patch together fragments of simple naiveness and corrupt barbarity. The question that I asked myself was, why did the choice of something to mediate my feelings so often fall on The Beatles' songs?

In the early 1970s my older brother bought on the black market a selfproduced *Abbey Road* tape-cassette, paying more than the equivalent of half the average monthly salary. We played it quietly, not to annoy mum and taking care that a censorious ear would not catch the tune.

Earlier still, and under much more dangerous circumstances, I remember the black-market circulation of discarded medical X-ray flms with Beatles songs etched on them. Pity I never had one. It could cost you not just two weeks' wages but also your studentship or job, or even worse, depending on the circumstances. A very helpful thing was that those 'bones' records were easy to bend and hide in the sleeve of your coat.

The more information I found on the topic and the more I retrieved facts and events from my own memory, the more I was astounded with the widespread and compelling Beatles subculture in Soviet Russia that I always knew I was part of, but never realized its tremendous cultural signifcance.

I always knew that my answer to a run-of-the-mill question about what music album I would take with myself to a deserted island would be an immediate *Abbey Road*. The choice, however, is not based purely on aesthetic preferences.

31 Ibid., loc. 694.

32 Richard Pipes, *Communism: A History* (New York: Modern Library, 2003), p. 69.

33 Julie Taymor, dir., *Across the Universe* (Sony Pictures Releasing, 2007).

Fig. 17 *'Cut-outs' from the pages of the thesis*, Lena Redman (May, 2016).

Fig. 18 *A record 'on bones'*, Lena Redman (April, 2016).

During my study, not without surprise and excitement, I came across Leslie Woodhead's book, *How The Beatles Rocked the Kremlin*. Bewildered, I read about the parallel universe where my own generation grew up. Many of Woodhead's characters call the Beatles fans (us!) the Soviet Beatles Kids. It was only through my multimodal probing that I came to realize how great a contribution our souls and minds, rocked by The Beatles' music, added to rocking the Kremlin and shaking Soviet Potemkin villages' walls. In the case of the Berlin Wall—literally. We did not even realise that when we (secretly from our parents) were tuning in to the waves of Radio Liberty, catching familiar tunes with poorly recognised English words, and nevertheless *recognised* 'Hey Jude, don't be afraid…', we were joining the vibration of another world, free from smothering ideological coercion. We were getting less and less afraid to stand against the fake façades of Soviet constructions. When our boys were growing their hair like The Beatles, and were very badly treated for this, along with their hair their defance was growing as well. As one of the Woodhead's characters, Kolya Vasin, recalls:

'The policeman said, "You are not Soviet man! You are living like a Western man!" And he grabbed my hair.' The memory of how the cop dragged him along the platform by his hair while dozens of people stared and laughed was branded into him. 'I was almost crying from the pain, but I had to keep silent. I was afraid the man would drag me of to prison'.34

Unfortunately, as far as I know, people of that Soviet Beatles Kids subculture never managed to stay back in their home country. Every one among those whom I personally know and would identify as one of the Soviet Beatles Kids, lives at the moment somewhere outside contemporary Russia. As Woodhead observes: 'Millions of kids across the Soviet Union must have shared something of Vasin's despair about their society, strangers in their own country'.35

Fig. 19 *The Beatles shook the Kremlin's walls,* Lena Redman (May, 2016).

34 Lesley Woodhead, *How The Beatles Rocked the Kremlin: The Untold Story of a Noisy Revolution* (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), loc. 1886.

35 Ibid., loc. 1052.

It feels as if the Beatles were that voice that made us open our eyes and look critically around. They made us test the ground under our feet and realise that there was no solid substance underneath the artifcially constructed surface. It was all just a Potemkin village. This realisation has pushed us out of the country.

Fig. 20 *Inspired by The Beatles, running the Soviet Union*, Lena Redman (September, 2016).

So we sailed up to the sun Till we found a sea of green And we lived beneath the waves In our yellow submarine…

This is an example of how technology has facilitated the penetration of the Iron Curtain, as Kolya Vasin in Woodhead's book says: 'After the Beatles, the Iron Curtain was like a fence with holes. That was our secret. We breathed through those holes'.36 The radio played a massive role in this process. Searching for our favourite music on Radio Liberty, we were also given a chance to hear about things in our own country that were hidden from us. These two aspects—the information disclosed about our society and our emotional response to The Beatles' music—were tightly intertwined in our mental schemata. They eventually became inseparable.

The invention of the 'records on bones' was one of the manifestations of growing resistance to the regime. Its symbolical implication, as if we were recording 'the spirit of freedom on people's bones', is an indication of the rigor of the subcultural movement. Medical images recorded on flm using electromagnetic radiation, together with the technology of etching sounds onto them, made it possible to disseminate the songs.

#### Conclusion

In those circumstances, with the Beatles' music infuencing the young generation of Soviet Russia in the seventies, the technology was a conduit that enabled the fow of independent thought into oppressed reality. Comparing the technological possibilities that were available for the Soviet Beatles Kids with those that are easily accessible for young people today, I think of the great possibilities that education has at its disposal. Maybe the modern system of teaching and learning, designed to guide young people in the 'right' direction and screen them from the troubled world, is in reality the Iron Curtain that prevents them from breathing fresh air, a Potemkin village façade that keeps people from fnding out and constructing their own truth about themselves and the world they live in.

In the area of knowledge generation, I see digital media—and cinematic bricolage, as one of its by-products—as an emancipating force available for scholars and students alike to use in their exploration of reality. In addressing this, I join my voice with those of Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg,37 Kincheloe (2003)38 and Kincheloe and Kathleen Berry (2004),39 who see teachers and students as producers of their own knowledge. Kincheloe and Steinberg argue that self-produced knowledge makes people:

[…] pursue a refective relationship to their everyday experiences, they gain the ability to explore the hidden forces that have shaped their lives […] to awaken themselves from a mainstream dream with unexamined landscape of knowledge and consciousness construction […]40

37 Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg, *Students as Researchers: Creating Classrooms that Matter* (New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 1998).

38 Joe L. Kincheloe, *Teachers as Researchers: Qualitative Inquiry as a Path to Empowerment* (New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2003).

39 Joe L. Kincheloe and Kathleen Berry, *Rigour and Complexity in Educational Research: Conceptualising the Bricolage* (London: Open University Press, 2004).

40 Ibid., p. 3.

Examining beliefs, social practices, dominant standpoints, using materials and tools they have at hand in their given context, and mediating meaning with digital media, cinematic bricoleurs may produce alternative bodies of knowledge. Cinematic bricoleurs may expose the correspondence between the phenomenon they are looking at and the social structures it is embedded in. Throughout this process, they may learn to form their own critical view and fnd strategies for its advocacy. Speaking metaphorically, they may invent their own 'records on bones' by expressing what previously was obscured from view, using whatever is in their repertoire. This results in the formation of holes in the existing Potemkin villages, making reality easier to see, access, understand and alter when necessary.

The methodology of cinematic bricolage, with its feedback loops of 'catching and being caught', provokes contingent situations and engenders conditions that allow one to take advantage of what was invisible at the start of the project. Such logic was expressed by one of the architects of the Social Study of Information Systems Research, Claudio Cibbora:

Curiously enough, successful information systems that are developed stem not from formal theories and structured methodologies, or from deliberate designs, but rather from chance events and improvised, serendipitous applications, which are not planned ex ante, and are often introduced by the users themselves through reinvention and *bricolage*; indeed, innovation happens by taking unanticipated paths and timing and assuming a local, apparently inconspicuous character at the outset.41

Embracing the process of epistemological innovation with its principle of a self-organizing feedback circuitry, the quotation above can be considered as describing a kinetic force that takes us to the notion of 'churning ripplework', where the circularities push at and pull against each other, causing shape bending and curving, producing multiple overlapping, and thus creating individually hybridized patterns of knowledge.

My train of logic in writing this chapter is tightly intertwined with visualizations and graphic representations and may appear interesting

41 As cited in Chrisanthi Avgerou, Giovan F. Lanzara and Leslie P. Willcocks, *Bricolage, Care and Information: Claudio Ciborra's Leagcy in Information Systems Research* (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 8.

to some and perhaps incongruous to others, on the grounds that such an approach is incompatible with traditional dissertation writing. Returning to the discussion of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic system of meaning-making, I have to argue that the logic of my approach lies in adding images and graphic elements to a set of traditional signifers (words), and organizing them in a spatial relation that helps to proceed with very individual way of gaining insights. My argument is not for a professional artistic use of images, sounds and movements—they can be replaced with stick fgures, simple shapes, humming and basic moves of the objects within a digital space—but for an analysis of the metacognition that the engagement with multimodality evokes.

My personal 'professionalism' in the use of images and infographics was helpful because it gave me confdence in their employment and, consequently, allowed me to explore the merger of multisystemic signifcation, where linguistic and visual elements (audio and movements that I used in my dissertation) enabled me to reach, as I believe, the deeper levels of metacognitive processes.

Such knowledge production methodology is oriented towards forging a uniquely personalized repertoire in reaching an intended goal. The cinematic knower/bricoleur starts with retrospection,42 examining how 'to make do'43 with the accessible tools and obtainable materials within the given context and according to personal competencies. The knower then works towards the expansion of his/her competencies and skills by connecting fragments of knowledge and their intuitive interpretation, the data from disparate domains, and pulling them into a unique and coherent narrative.

The bricoleur's improvisations are prompted by his/her individual agentic skills in fnding resourceful means—or, as Lévi-Strauss puts it, 'devious means'44—of negotiating between his/her intention, the availability of resources and skills and the afordances of tools. From this perspective, the methodology of cinematic bricolage emerges not from the professionalism of a craftsman but from a DIY process of organization of fragments from diverse theoretical and practical felds, and by means of the utilization of a uniquely personal range of skills and strategies.

42 Lévi-Strauss, *The Savage Mind*, p. 18.

43 Ibid., p. 17.

44 Ibid., p. 16.

#### Bibliography

# 14. Precarity and Promise:

Negotiating Research Ethics and Copyright in a History Dissertation

*Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe*

Digital history has long been associated with George Mason University (GMU). The pioneering work of Roy Rosenzweig and many others in establishing the Center for History and New Media in 1994 (now the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, hereafter RRCHNM) has put GMU on the map as a leader in digital work. Surrounded by the innovative digital work at RRCHNM, and encouraged by the required two course sequence of digital theory and praxis in the history PhD program, I conceptualized my dissertation project as a web-based work of scholarship. As a history of twentieth-century American visual culture and disability, I envisioned my dissertation benefting from the multimodal potential of a digital presentation for visually providing layered analyses and interpretations of visual artifacts. That potential is tempered by precarity, by a complex set of factors, power and relationships for a doctoral student to negotiate.

Centering visual materials as objects of analysis in digital work raises unique questions around access, presentation and scope of work at multiple levels. Efectively pushing beyond the convention of images as decorative illustrations within a dissertation requires education and resource support for the doctoral student, the degree-granting institution, university presses and the discipline. Without concerted efort at each level to better deal with issues of copyright and image permissions, doctoral students pursuing visual culture oriented digital dissertations will continue to be overburdened with complications for their scope of inquiry and career prospects. This chapter will frst introduce my dissertation project, then discuss the particular issues I encountered during the dissertation as illustrative examples of questions facing scholars whose source bases feature visual materials (photographs, posters, flm and television clips) that may fall under copyright. It was these conversations and negotiations around image and media permissions that created instances of precarity and opportunity with the organizational archives I consulted, with my university, and with my discipline.

The dissertation, 'They Need You! Disability, Visual Culture, and the Poster Child, 1945–1980', examines the visual history of the national poster child—an ofcial representative for both a disease and an organization—in post-World War II America. I argue that the poster child fundraising and educational campaigns deployed by the March of Dimes (MOD) Foundation and Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) shifted American understanding of physical disability in new ways by capitalizing on mass media to depict disabled children within their families and communities as full, if physically limited, citizens of the nation. These campaigns used the rhetoric of disease eradication to promote medical cures for disability and illness, and highlighted their role in funding these cures. The organizations' approach promoted a narrow view of disease and disability as largely childhood conditions to be overcome, which also precluded political avenues and policies beyond medical research such as family support and advocacy for disabled adults experiencing post-polio syndrome or continuing to live with muscular dystrophy.

'They Need You' is presented through the publishing platform Scalar, created and maintained at the University of Southern California. The project is organized and presented through a visual index which appears on the project home page. The goal of the visual index is to make visible each project element: image, textual source, analytical writing, annotation, historiography, etc. This allows readers to explore content through a set of themes or keywords (such as gender, family, March of Dimes); hovering over one element highlights its connections to themes and to other elements. I created six 'paths', Scalar terminology for a series of linked elements, that create linear reading experiences through the content.

My rationale for pursuing a fully-digital dissertation is grounded in the felds framing this project, particularly visual culture studies and disability studies. I wanted to emphasize the centrality of the visual sources, and to make those analyses apparent to readers. While print conventions allow for images to be interspersed in text, I wanted to push beyond static placement and the inability to present multiple interpretations or narratives. Additionally, a layered visual presentation would begin to address the reality that disabled children have been historically silent, and silenced, in the archival record. Children's voices have not been well-documented, and disabled children have historically been institutionalized, marginalized or erased by the adults surrounding them.1 Surfacing these lived experiences and voices in the archive is vital. I sought to avoid re-inscribing the silences by highlighting disabled children in these organization's collections and using the afordances of digital publishing platforms to make these artifacts available for other researchers and interested readers.

The tenuous state of both archives made it imperative to me to make visible as much of the source base as possible to ensure the collections could continue to be used in some capacity. Over the last two decades, the MOD and the MDA had gradually reduced funding and stafng for their archival collections. Neither organization had fully catalogued and processed their collections, and neither had they done any digitization beyond a handful of images requested and paid for by documentarians and previous researchers. The MOD's reduction occurred more recently. Until 2015, the organization's sense of historical memory justifed dedicating resources to the preservation of the archive and opening it in some capacity to researchers. Two key events shaped the charity's desire to keep and maintain an archive: the organization's founding by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the successes of their early work on polio and namely support of the Salk vaccine. As a result, they prioritized processing the collections most relevant to FDR and the medical story of developing the cure for polio over the collections from the education and women's division among others. The MDA, on the other hand, laid of their archivist years ago and moved much of their

1 Susan Burch and Ian Sutherland, 'Who's Not Yet Here? American Disability History', *Radical History Review*, 94 (2006), 127–47 (pp. 128–30), https://doi. org/10.1215/01636545-2006-94-127

historical materials into a non-temperature-controlled storage unit near their headquarters in Tucson, Arizona.2 The materials available from the MDA were primarily published reports and newsletters, and I was given access to approximately fve unprocessed boxes of historical materials. These boxes turned out to be full of irreparably heat damaged artifacts: photographs melted together, and flm strips loose and sandwiched between stacks of papers. The MOD and MDA are not alone in putting scant resources toward the preservation of their historical materials, and many of the challenges digitizing those collections are well-described by archivists and librarians in public institutions.

Private organizations have their own senses of institutional memory, and are not immediately inclined toward supporting access to their materials. Unlike working with academic libraries and archives or private research institutions such as the Huntington Library or Rockefeller Archive Center—active charitable organizations are focused more with their current mission and public perception and reputation, and can take wildly diferent approaches to their holdings. Both the March of Dimes and Muscular Dystrophy Association take a commercial and protective approach to their archival materials. For the MOD, popular interest in FDR and the story of polio in America has created an opportunity for the organization to proft from the licensing of their archival materials. As a result, I found them more interested in asserting their claims to copyright than in discussions around fair use or the academic use of these materials.

The MDA has a diferent attitude toward their archival materials. The vast popularity of Jerry Lewis in their fundraising activity, and the subsequent backlash against his attitudes and performance by members of the disability rights movement, has led the MDA to take a more cautious stance with regards to researchers and external interest.3 Whereas the MOD recognizes, to some extent, their place in the nation's historical memory, the MDA is more narrowly focused on current public perception. For example, a MDA staf member expressed concern over my interest in a 1950s era photograph depicting a frefghter teaching

2 Information told to me in conversation with two MDA ofcers. I was unable to get access to internal documents or published records to verify the information.

3 Paul K. Longmore, 'The Cultural Framing of Disability: Telethons as a Case Study', *PMLA*, 120 (2005), 502–08 (p. 505), https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812900167793

children using wheelchairs about fre safety. Their point of concern was the frefghter's use of graphic photos of burned bodies as evidence of the dangers of fres for wheelchair users. While they allowed that I understood the context around the image, they worried about an uncritical viewer's negative response toward the frefghter. And the frefghters' union, I learned soon after, was one of the frst and most enduring group of supporters for the charity. The MDA staf member tried to redirect my interest toward a less contentious image, and further, cast doubt on whether I could include the original image or if they could assert copyright to put the photo out of my reach. The MDA's reaction to the frefghter photo highlights their wish to more directly curate and shape not only access to the materials, but also the resulting analysis and presentation that would result from my research.

The charities' attitudes raise serious questions for researchers in general, but particularly for doctoral students who likely lack the institutional support and resources of full-time academic faculty and staf. My status as a doctoral student, and the digital nature of my dissertation, complicated the organizations' responses to my inquiries. Overall, they understood that I was an individual researcher-in-training, with limited funds, and were generally sympathetic to what I was trying to achieve. The March of Dimes archivist, and the art director and VP of Publications for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, all responded kindly to my requests for access and were helpful in locating relevant material. However, those individual kindnesses were tempered by an organizational wariness toward anyone who could potentially cause tension or complicate the narratives they wished to tell about their own organizational histories. The digital aspect of the dissertation was at once the most interesting and the most fraught aspect of our interactions. Here, tensions arose between individual staf member and the larger organizational views of what it means to have digital artifacts and information online for external audiences.

Copyright is a well-known landmine when pursuing digital work. In the feld of United States digital history, the majority of projects either pursue pre-copyright topics (pre-1923) or center on digitized public domain sources from the twentieth century. Projects that have managed to partner with or gain access to private collections, such as the *Robots Reading Vogue* project, rely on institutional reputation and resources in negotiating with private companies for access to historical materials.4 A lone doctoral student, on the other hand, lacks those supports and is in a more vulnerable position in dialogue and negotiations with private organizations.

Like many universities, GMU places the onus for copyright clearance and use rights on the student. Institutional training and support in these areas, however, are thin. At the department level, the formal digital dissertation guidelines mentions issues in copyright and use agreements in the context of the bibliography and the need for a statement describing the factors behind whether the project data is publicly available or not.5 Copyright and fair use were taught in the abstract during the required digital coursework, and was only rarely an issue for RRCHNM projects, so the department had never had to grapple with their role and responsibility for training students to negotiate these issues. The library was also little help. The copyright expert in the scholarly communications department of the library pointed me toward some external resources, and was able to provide only general advice and otherwise referred me to legal counsel. The latter suggestion was never a viable option for me fnancially, and I was unsure how to follow up on my questions or how to seek external advice. Neither the history department nor GMU are unique in this regard: the complexity and the legal aspects of copyright and fair use are fraught and often seen as beyond the scope of a department/library/college's purview. While understandable to some degree, the result is that doctoral students are ill-prepared to consider the ethical and legal questions of intellectual property that are increasingly prevalent in pursuit of scholarship in the digital world. Left to themselves, success is largely driven by an individual doctoral student's ability to seek and to avail themselves of external resources and contacts. Shifting some of that responsibility and support to the degree granting institution, from the department to the library to the graduate programs, would help alleviate the burden on the student, who is unquestionably the most vulnerable and precarious actor in this process.

4 Lindsay King and Peter Leonard, *Robots Reading Vogue*, http://dh.library.yale.edu/ projects/vogue/

5 Department of History and Art at George Mason University, 'Digital Dissertation Guidelines', https://historyarthistory.gmu.edu/graduate/phd-history/digitaldissertation-guidelines

The ubiquity of information online and the ways in which content is constantly sampled, remixed and decontextualized forced the organizations to consider their own digital content strategies and the extent to which they accepted scholarly work entering the equation. A public-facing digital dissertation, like it does for academia, raised uncomfortable questions for both organizations. The limited circulation of a print dissertation was a familiar convention, and allowed the charities to take a generally more tolerant attitude toward the reproduction and use of their archival materials in that context. But a project accessible to anyone with an internet connection, one that could be viewed by a wide range of people, was an entirely diferent proposition. The presentation of the visual artifacts themselves was the key pain-point; the charities would have preferred the convention of describing images through prose, with only a handful of carefully selected images visible. In their view, the images-as-illustrations model mediates some of the perceived risks of making materials available online by allowing the charities (and perhaps scholars) to curate and present only those images that pass muster across a range of criteria: availability, content, copyright status.

The perceived risks associated with scholarly publication of archival materials can be seen most directly in the fees assessed. In a 2015 conversation with the MOD, I was given the rate card with all charges listed: the cost per image for a scholarly publication (book or article) was \$50; the digital rights to the same image cost \$500.6 At the time of this conversation, I had identifed 120 images that I defnitely wanted to include in the project and potentially hundreds more. A base cost of \$60,000 is an unbelievable amount for any work of scholarship, let alone a dissertation. The MDA did not share their fee schedule with me, but did intimate that these decisions were made in consultation with their legal team. In fact, staf at both organizations referenced the presence and tenacity of their legal team in protecting the organizations from malfeasance. In the end, I avoided paying for image use by agreeing to password protect the images to avoid the wider dissemination that the charities worried about. I was disappointed with this outcome, but without signifcant personal resources or greater institutional support I felt that I was unable to negotiate further, and was fearful that any misstep would embroil me in a legal dispute that I could not win.

6 March of Dimes Foundation, Rate Card, 2015.

This experience is illustrative of the risks doctoral students can face pursuing a public-facing digital dissertation, and the complex tradeofs necessary to complete a project so reliant on visual materials. It is common advice to avoid such knotty topics in the frst place, to choose a project where the challenges are well-known by faculty advisors and relatively benign. And to some extent, such advice is sound. The larger implication, however, is that doctoral students—and by extension their faculty mentors—do not get the opportunity to learn and expand their knowledge on these questions by working through such difcult problems programmatically. At a higher level, historical inquiry as whole is impoverished by the repeated attempts to neatly avoid the messiness of copyright, fair use, intellectual property, and privately held organizational archives.

The charities and I had to contend with a challenging question: to what extent was a digital dissertation available online a publication? It could be argued that a print dissertation in the North American context is a quasi-publication, with a limited intended dissemination and, in disciplines like history, serves as a dress rehearsal for a monograph.7 As such, it is constrained in its circulation by design. But to the charities, a dissertation presented online was a publication by virtue of being online. Whereas the nuance between self-publication and pee- reviewed publication, and the emphasis on the latter as conducted by a recognized press as a legitimizing feature, are known and fairly well understood in academic circles, those distinctions meant little to the organizations. While a publicly-available digital dissertation seemed to be a publication that merited the same fees as any other website or documentary request to the charities, its meaning within the pipeline of academia is less clear-cut.

Publication pipelines for digital projects and monographs are still emergent, and continue to lean heavily on the print paradigm. One example is found within the primary style guide of the discipline, *The Chicago Manual of Style*. The guide perpetuates some of the conceptual difculties through its continued categorization of visual sources as 'illustrations', and assignment of a separate treatment from the

7 Fredrika J. Teute, 'Dissertations Are Not Books' (April 1, 2015), *Perspectives in History*, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/ april-2015/dissertations-are-not-books

note and citation format of textual sources.8 This distinction and the subsequent conventions around captioning and inserting 'illustrations' into text implicitly renders a value judgment that images are separate at best, and decorative at worst. That attitude toward images has strong infuence on how disciplinary departments, university libraries and presses, and even private archives view the study and presentation of visual materials. Throughout the dissertation stage, I heard variations of the same question from people in all the above listed groups: could I substitute public domain images for the ones held in private collections? This notion of changing images makes sense for those for whom images are illustrative but not integral, and in select cases where another image might be able to display similar content or composition to help support the argument. In a project where the specifc images are the central objects of study, substitution substantively shifts the inquiry by changing the core source base. Thus, the implications for increasing institutional support at multiple levels for public-facing, image-centered digital work touch the direction of scholarship for the discipline as a whole.

Copyright and image clearance in a digital ecosystem is a thorny issue, one publishers have so far hesitated to take on. If the March of Dimes is a warning indicator, fees for digital rights now signifcantly exceed the typical subvention costs associated with publishing images. The institutional weight and reputation of the press can factor both positively and negatively: for every bit of legitimacy lent to the project and author, there is also the institutional risk and cost calculus to take into account. Responsibility for those costs and agreements still largely falls to the author, though an author under contract occupies a more secure position from which to negotiate than a doctoral student. The implications for this tension resonate back to the choice and defnition of a dissertation project's scope of inquiry. In a monograph-oriented discipline like history, the prospect of pushing a project through from dissertation to published monograph is a signifcant factor. Without explicit support from publishers, an image-heavy project has a limited and precarious lifecycle during and beyond the dissertation stage, which can have serious ramifcations for emerging scholars who wish to study visual artifacts and analysis in digital spaces.

8 The University of Chicago, *The Chicago Manual of Style*, 17th edition (2017), http:// www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed17/part1/ch03/toc.html

Without increased and concerted institutional support from department to university to publisher, digital dissertations will continue to be a potentially precarious choice for doctoral students. Broader engagement with issues around copyright, fair use and intellectual property at all levels—departments, universities, disciplines and publishers—can more fully open opportunities for digital dissertations to take greater advantage of the afordances of the medium and continue to widen the avenues and kinds of research pursued.

#### Bibliography

Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, *Scalar*, https://scalar.me/anvc/

# 15. Lessons from the Sandbox:

## Linking Readership, Representation and Reflection in Tactile Paths

*Christopher Williams*

In December 2016, I successfully defended a natively digital dissertation in Artistic Research entitled 'Tactile Paths: On and through Notation for Improvisers'1 (hereafter, TP) at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University. In this chapter I will share a few feld notes on my motivation for publishing TP as a website, my chosen platform, on the collaboration with a professional designer, and the consequences of this route for the research process itself.

I write as a user of digital publication tools, rather than a scholar or designer of them. Both despite and by virtue of this limited perspective, I hope what follows might prove a useful case study for writers and theorists of digital dissertations, in Artistic Research and beyond.

#### Topic

The topic of TP is the encounter of notation and improvisation in contemporary music, of which I am both a scholar and a composerperformer. This topic was a crucial factor in my embrace of the webbased format. Historically speaking, notation for improvisers is nothing new. There are many examples of music across epochs and cultures in which notation and improvisation fruitfully coexist: Tibetan ritual

1 Christopher Williams, 'Tactile Paths: On and through Notation for Improvisers' (PhD dissertation, Leiden University, 2016), http://www.tactilepaths.net/

horn tablature, Duke Ellington's big band music, or the Chinese guqin tradition. Up until the late nineteenth century, this encounter was also common in Western concert music, e.g., medieval chant, baroque *basso continuo* and virtuosic Romantic solo repertoire. However, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, academic discourse and compositional practice in Western concert music tended toward the idea that written notation should comprehensively prescribe and/ or preserve the salient elements of musical works. Consequently, improvisation became less visible than it had been previously.

Over the last ffty years, improvisation has returned to prominence in both practice and theory. Many key fgures in contemporary music have integrated both notated and improvised practices into their work. Likewise, performativity and improvisation have begun to recapture scholars' attention. Nevertheless, most contemporary music that works explicitly and dynamically with improvisation and notation still remains underrepresented. Very little of this work has been analyzed collectively. The goal of TP is thus to articulate a conceptual framework for these practices. To this end, I analyze aesthetically and historically diverse examples of the practice to fnd common methodological threads. These threads reveal core issues and principles applicable to a broad spectrum of other work, trends and problems in contemporary music.

#### Field

TP inhabits the broader academic feld of Artistic Research (hereafter, AR). Like the topic of TP, a few words on AR should help clarify my approach to native digital publication. Henk Borgdorf, an oft-cited AR spokesman, characterizes the feld as follows:

The expression artistic research connects two domains: art and academia. Obviously the term can also be used in a general sense. Every artist does research as she works, as she tries to fnd the right material, the right subject, as she looks for information and techniques to use in her studio or atelier, or when she encounters something, changes something or begins anew in the course of her work. Artistic research in the emphatic sense […] unites the artistic and the academic in an enterprise that impacts on both domains. Art thereby transcends its former limits, aiming through the research to contribute to thinking and understanding; academia, for its part, opens up its boundaries to forms of thinking and understanding that are interwoven with artistic practices.2

[A]rtistic research—embedded in artistic and academic contexts—is the articulation of the unrefective, non-conceptual content enclosed in aesthetic experiences, enacted in creative practices and embodied in artistic products.3

Following Borgdorf, I seek to articulate 'the unrefective, non-conceptual content enclosed in aesthetic experiences'—to unpack my own practical work with notation for improvisers. Since existing theories of notation and improvisation fail to explain the research objects, for reasons described above, working with the materials frsthand is a useful point of departure. Strategic documentation of this practice provides rich data that more conventional scientifc observation may be ill-equipped to capture. At the same time, refection in the process of documentation deepens and transforms the practice: observing oneself working changes how one works. This is not merely a condition of Tactile Paths; it is an objective. In the dissertation I aimed to develop my own creative work and that of my artistic community, and thus 'unite the artistic and the academic in an enterprise that impacts on both domains' (my emphasis). In other words, Tactile Paths is both a discussion and an instance of artistic practice.

#### Motivation: Readership

Early in my doctoral studies, my supervisors Marcel Cobussen, Richard Barrett and Frans de Ruiter suggested publishing TP as a website. Cobussen, author of one of the frst natively digital PhD dissertations4 in Europe, was especially encouraging.5 His rationale was twofold. First, readership would increase immensely. As an example, he cited regularly

2 Henk Borgdorf, 'The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research', in *The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts*, ed. by Michael Biggs and Hendrik Karlsson (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 44–63 (p. 44).

3 Ibid., p.47.

4 Marcel Cobussen, 'Deconstruction in Music' (PhD dissertation, Erasmus University, 2002), http://www.deconstruction-in-music.com/navbar/index.html

5 I should note that Cobussen himself received no such encouragement as a student. Like editor Virginia Kuhn, he encountered stif resistance from university administration. For having 'broken the digital ice', I am grateful to him, Kuhn and others featured in this volume.

receiving emails from new readers of his dissertation nearly ffteen years after its publication. On this point I was immediately sold. In terms of accessibility, a bound volume housed in a university library or a PDF stored in academic databases can hardly compete with a contemporary open-access website. Like scholars in any feld, I wished to maximize exposure. Specifcally, I wished to reach fellow practitioners who would rarely, if ever, fnd my work in academic contexts. Many of my peers in contemporary music read professional magazines and books, but only a limited number of them read academic journals where TP might be cited or published in article form. Even fewer would fnd TP directly in a university library or digital repository. A website would intersect with this demographic's habitual knowledge circuits.

Cobussen's second rationale was the ease with which the web absorbs nonverbal media such as audio, video, and musical scores. Integrating such materials is far less practical with physical media. Examining a large, detailed score in a bound A4-sized book while navigating a separate DVD can be clumsy. Comparing multiple audio recordings simultaneously is impossible from a single playback device. On a website, however, such functionalities are painless for the writer to implement and the reader to engage with. This ease of media integration was important for presenting work by other artists that I would analyze. Since the practices under scrutiny were poorly represented in mainstream publishing and scholarly discourse, readers needed access to high-quality primary sources. I also needed to adequately represent my own creative work at the heart of the research. In both cases, showcasing time-based and nonverbal media was essential.

#### Discovering Design Issues: Representation

After deciding to publish TP in a natively digital form, a website, my next step was to investigate the *Research Catalogue* (hereafter, *RC*), a go-to platform for many artistic researchers. *RC* combines a websitebuilding interface, hosting service, and social network for diverse AR projects and publications. Users include over 10,000 graduate students and professors, independent scholars, institutions and journals such as the *Journal for Artistic Research*, *RUUKKU* and the *Journal of Sonic Studies*. Initially, *RC* seemed ideal. Cost-free membership provides simple, intuitive tools for building multimedia expositions; unlimited media hosting and high-quality media players; basic technical support from *RC* staf; and access to a large AR community. After further experimentation, though, I found a number of fundamental problems. First, *RC* layouts are non-responsive. They do not adapt to diferently sized computer screens, tablets, and smartphones.6 On smaller devices, all visual information shrinks to ft the screen. This is an obvious problem for fatigued eyes. While one rarely reads an entire dissertation from a smartphone, a casually interested reader may initially peruse it this way. If the contents are illegibly small, one may not return to it later on a larger device.

Second, *RC* links styling and content in raw HTML; it does not permit CSS.7 Authors must manually place and format every section of a text and multimedia object in a given project. This work then expands by a factor of (x) number of pages in a given project. (One can imagine the stress this creates for designing a dissertation of several chapters.)8  *RC*  thus provides no centralized way to ensure consistency among layouts and typography classes across an entire project. Furthermore, sharing and forking layouts is impossible; this is surprising, considering the community-oriented nature of the initiative.

The third problem I discovered is a consequence of the frst two: all content in RC, including thumbnails and media players, occupies an absolute position in the layout. Sticky headers and sidebars, or areas of a page that remain in place at the top or on the side of the screen independent of user scrolling, are impossible to implement. If an

6 *RC* founder Michael Schwab states that '*RC* was conceived and developed by SAR [Society for Artistic Research] at a time when the internet was still very much a desktop afair [2010–12]. This explains the above mentioned developments [nonresponsive layouts], but also the slowness in which things happen: SAR is not a business with investment and return, but a non-proft association that serves its members (and the wider community). So I won't be able to say much about how things will look in the near future regarding issues of responsive design etc'. Personal email to the author, June 23, 2018.

7 Cascading Style Sheet is a standard styling language used by web designers to format HTML content. It permits global changes to layouts, typography, etc. To their credit, the technicians at *RC* did attempt to test the integration of a CSS template at my behest. Unfortunately, it was not successful.

8 Schwab notes that 'the publishing of theses may have been in people's minds, but did not matter at this stage. What mattered was to create a link between sustainability, a requirement for serious publishing, and (web) design'. Schwab, personal email to the author, June 23, 2018.

exposition contains a lengthy scrollable verbal text, media players and thumbnails usually occupy a fxed location within or beside it. Visually, this relegates nonverbal media to the status of fgures or footnotes, i.e., supporting evidence. On the other hand, nonverbal media or players can be large and centrally placed, with verbal text placed in an internally scrollable window beside them. In this case, the hierarchy is reversed, and verbal text may resemble a caption or program note. This problem turned out to be a dealbreaker for TP. In order to present nonverbal media on equal footing with verbal text, I wished to make all materials as accessible as possible to the user/reader at all times. This would prioritize primary sources as I required and allow for quick and easy cross-referencing.

#### Lesson #1: Nuts and Bolts Help Reveal the Big Picture

While it may sound as if I came to *RC* expecting things it could not ofer, the truth is quite the opposite. Before experimenting with *RC*, my understanding of responsive design and CSS was hazy at best; I did not even know sticky elements existed. I came to see the need for them through my frustration with *RC*'s structural infexibility. Ironically, working through this technical frustration gave a boost to my research process as a whole. It was clear before addressing any design questions that verbal texts and nonverbal media should intertwine in a general sense. However, the particulars of their integration only began to emerge through experimentation. My principal discovery, as elementary as it was consequential, was that multiple media fles could be grouped as a gallery independent from the verbal text. The possibility of emphasizing scores, video, and audio together in the layout highlighted the exhibitional potential of the web format in a way that I had not imagined. That potential, combined with my original intention to share my research objects with a broader public, gave the dissertation a new curatorial impulse.

Beyond considering how to package my arguments efectively for my supervisors and a few selected experts, I began to grapple with how to represent my feld of inquiry appropriately. Choosing my objects of analysis was no longer merely a function of theoretical relevance or personal taste, but also of their potential to provoke readers to rethink the identity of my topic. I believe the fnal constellation of research objects, i.e., the work I discuss in Paths 1–5 (a Path is the equivalent of a chapter in this website), refects this new concern. The music analyzed is radically distinct on aesthetic, historical and methodological levels. The scores employ a range of notational elements: from informal verbal instructions to detailed conventional Western notation and abstract graphics. Some of the work is more exemplary of notation for improvisers, some less obviously so.

The website also became a space for users to explore materials themselves. To this end, interaction between verbal text and multimedia from Path to Path is also quite diverse. For example, in Path 1, an original documentary flm plays a leading role in articulating physicality in works by Malcolm Goldstein; the brief verbal text serves simply to frame it. In Path 3, the verbal text is the protagonist, but a signifcant portion of it mixes analytical refections with playful performance instructions reminiscent of the work under lens, Ben Patterson's *Variations for Double-Bass* (1961). Path 5 presents a collection of unpublished scores and out-of-print recordings by Bob Ostertag in a grid that allows readers to trace how notation and recordings in a four-part project relate over time.

Granted, some of these results may have been possible in book form, and/or for an exclusively academic audience. My point is that the very need to think about these issues of representation took root in a technical discovery, sticky media galleries and the disseminatory afordances of an open-access website more generally. Without tinkering with the nuts and bolts of web design, this would not have happened.

#### Implementation: Reflection

Presented with the above-mentioned arguments for using an alternative to *RC*, my supervisors agreed to fund professional web design. I chose to work with Patricia Reed of Leaky Studio, a specialist in projects for art, culture and academia. She played a key role in maximizing TP's potential, both content- and audience-wise. Reed proposed developing TP with WordPress (hereafter, WP), a free9 and open-source content management system used to build an estimated 25–30% of the world's

9 Unlike RC, WP does not ofer free hosting.

websites.10 Aside from Reed's own positive experience with the platform, two specifc features recommended WP for the project. First, WP uses CSS, along with Java and other common web scripting languages. This permitted responsive layouts, sticky sidebars and other basic functionalities I missed from *RC*. WP and CSS decouple content from styling, so non-expert users such as myself can input their own content when working in tandem with a programmer/designer who customizes front-end and back-end to their needs. Second, there is a community of millions of developing themes, improvements, plugins, add-ons and security fxes for WP mainly free of charge to implement. (This is a stark contrast to *RC*, which limits authors to its own tools.) As WP becomes more prolifc, the likelihood of rapid software irrelevance is improbable. Although WP was initially conceived as a blogging platform rather than a durable archive, its ubiquity has ironically translated into a kind of de facto 'security or permanence factor', according to Reed.11

Using WP for a dissertation has its limitations, as does any platform. First, decoupling content from styling is a double-edged sword. Authors who are unable to do their own specialized design work—more the rule than the exception in a feld such as music—need support for all but the crudest tasks. Generally this costs money. I had the rare privilege of support from a forward-thinking department that was both willing and able to pay Reed for her labor. Most PhD students, particularly in our neoliberal era, do not. Technical interdependence in WP also has its downsides. In order to solve a variety of aesthetic and functional issues, we used plugins by third-party developers. Compatibility among these plugins and with rolling WP system updates requires maintenance. Reed states that 'all existing uploaded/created content must remain updated within the system—meaning that yearly upgrades would be suggested, as opposed to the printed dissertation which can be done once and forgotten. Online is synonymous with perpetual attention (upgrades)'.12 This is precisely the sustainability problem that *RC* solves by limiting design tools to its own.

10 Monty Munford, 'How WordPress Ate the Internet in 2016… And the World in 2017' (December 22, 2016), *Forbes*, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ montymunford/2016/12/22/how-wordpress-ate-the-internet-in-2016-and-theworld-in-2017/

11 Personal email to the author, June 23, 2017.

12 Personal email to the author, June 23, 2017. At the time of writing, eighteen months after defending TP, I have not updated any element of the website. It looks the same as when it was fnalized.

#### Collaboration

The interpersonal element was at least as important to TP's design as conceptual and technical factors. Reed and I began working together in early 2015, about two years before I defended TP. The time we spent collaborating while I was writing the content allowed her knowledge of design to enrich my own research process.13 Our point of departure was the following outline, which I prepared alone in October 2014:

# Tactile Paths — WEBSITE STRUCTURE

## Introduction/ Table of Contents + TAGS page

## 12–15 "chapter" pages (each about a single musician/ group/ piece/ group of pieces, not ordered by number, similarly formatted). Each chapter contains:

## Bibliography

## Copyright/ Acknowledgements

## About/ Contact

We implemented much of this plan as I intended. But the best solutions were not always obvious from the outset. Throughout our collaboration, seemingly superfcial details would provoke deeper questions about user

13 By 'writing' I also include the preparation and production of relevant nonverbal media, not only verbal text.

experience. These would then require refection on my core research, much as my discovery of sticky sidebars had before Reed appeared.

The media gallery layout in the Paths was one signifcant case. Reed initially proposed a framework based on hideable panels placed to the side of a centered verbal text. One panel contained tags, another contained the media. Readers could open either panel by clicking on its corresponding vertical tab. Tags and media were accessible at any location in the verbal text, as I had requested. We also avoided clutter among multiple categories of information packed into a single screen.

Meanwhile, I was also working on Path 1, 'Seeing the Full Sounding' (described above), and Path 2, 'A Treatise Remix Handbook', which centers on an original radio piece about Cornelius Cardew's graphic score *Treatise* (1967). In both cases, I was in the process of determining how written verbal text would integrate with the audio and video pieces, which contained spoken explanatory verbal texts of their own.

The panel layout was a clean and beautiful option, but observing how the panels separated verbal text and multimedia into discrete zones gave me a slight discomfort. I realized that a certain degree of clutter between words and time-based media was actually desirable. It would help maximize connections between the medial presence of the verbal text and the explanatory potential of the audio and video. This would rhetorically reinforce my exploration of the dialectic of poetry and program in experimental notation as a whole. Thus, we adopted a layout in which tags and media would be permanently visible alongside the main column of verbal text.

Moreover, this refection shaped the content of Paths 1 and 2. Instead of merely unpacking the nonverbal media, the verbal texts also extend and question them. In Path 1, for example, I discuss sociologist Richard Sennett's concept of 'expressive instructions,' which he elaborates in a discussion of three diferent recipes for a famous French chicken dish.14 Although I do not discuss Sennett anywhere in the flm, this part of the verbal text links the documentary's specialized subject and flmmaking techniques to practices beyond the flm's immediate purview. In Path 2, I cite Cardew's thoughts about *Treatise* both in the verbal text as rightjustifed, italicized quotes and in the radio piece as spoken text. Each

14 Richard Sennett, *The Craftsman* (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 179–93.

context ofers the reader a diferent, sometimes contradictory, framework in which to consider Cardew's theories of notation and improvisation, which changed considerably throughout his career.

Finally, Reed refned my vision for user experience and ultimately opened TP it to a wider public. The website as a whole functions as a sort of meta-score for improvisers. As there is no linear argument from Path to Path, readers can 'choose their own adventure' through the dissertation. I had planned for tags, or Topics, to provide the principal link between Paths. Reed included additional 'tactile' and user-friendly elements for the same purpose. The homepage and main navigation menu, for example, list all the chapters in random order with rollover GIF animations and visual icons, respectively. These entice the reader to interact with the structure more intuitively than my original plan. She also added a search function, with which readers can cut across Paths by efectively inventing and implementing their own index.

#### Lesson #2: Work with and Learn from Designers

This lesson would seem like an inevitable conclusion to the previous section. However, collaboration is not, as a rule, the center of doctoral training. The task of the PhD student in any discipline, as my supervisors and others such as artist and design scholar Ken Friedman15 have framed it, is to show that one is capable of independent research by making an original contribution to one's feld. Universities award PhDs to *individuals* who accomplish this task. In AR, the medium of presentation may form an inherent part of that original contribution, as it does in TP. So it follows that students in these cases should also perform the design work, just as they write what might more conventionally be called 'content'. Or does it?

*RC* founder and AR theorist Michael Schwab indirectly shares this line of thought when he cites *RC*'s often 'underdesigned' appearance, a consequence of artists meeting the sometimes unwieldy challenge of integrating graphic and web design as crucial elements of their research:

15 Ken Friedman, 'Now that We're Diferent, What's Still the Same?', in *Doctoral Writing in the Creative and Performing Arts*, ed. by Louise Ravelli, Bruce Paltridge and Sue Starfeld (Faringdon: Libri Publishing, 2014), pp. 237–62 (p. 249).

[O]ne can claim that the *RC* allows the calibration of an exposition, where this calibration forms an essential part of the research's experience and meaning. One might also want to add that a sense of integrity may be given space at the experiential core of a researcher's practice. Conversely, one may question the corporate sites of research—including those of academia—for interfering with the meaning of research through the control of the presentation.16

Schwab rightly prioritizes the intellectual and experiential role of design in AR. He values *RC* as a way to give AR scholars individual control over their presentation formats, even at the expense of conventional aesthetic standards. But he paints an unnecessarily binary picture of *RC*  and the alternatives: do it yourself, or leave it to professional managers or corporate journals and research portals. This view does not take into account how researchers and designers can work *together* to *enhance* AR projects.

My experience with TP shows a fruitful middle way between the poles of total DIY and outsourcing. Collaborating with Reed involved no abdication of intellectual or aesthetic responsibility, nor any semblance of 'interference'. On the contrary, her contribution maintained high professional design standards *and* provided me valuable conceptual feedback, without which the project might not have reached its full potential. Reed's role was more akin to a lab partner than an employee.

Our collaboration is just one example of how designers and PhD students—not only in AR—can collaborate. Designers can advise on visual representation for the web in any discipline and at every scale, from site architecture, layout and typography to graphs and tables. Even when funds are not available for integral web design, students can learn from designers through online tutorials, workshops and other forums. Looking toward the future, one hopes that as native digital publishing becomes increasingly normalized, funding for designers and design education might become a more routine part of doctoral training in general.

16 Michael Schwab, 'Expositions in the Research Catelogue', in *The Exposition of Artistic Research Publishing Art in Academia*, ed. by Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdorf (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2014), pp. 92–104 (p. 100).

#### Lesson #3: AR and Natively Digital Dissertations are Good for Each Other

In this chapter, I have traced a few important elements and moments in writing TP as a native, media-rich website. Three interrelated concepts readership, representation and refection—anchor my narrative, which may be summarized as follows. Firstly, my research topic, notation for improvisers, is of interest to many nonacademics. I adopted the website format principally to reach them. Since my research objects were poorly represented in mainstream publishing and scholarly discourse, it was important to provide readers high-quality documentation of work by other artists, and of my own artistic interventions at the heart of the research process. Secondly, the main task of the web design was to represent artistic documentation appropriately together with lengthy verbal texts. This required making media and texts *simultaneously* accessible, so readers could compare them and perceive the kinds of tension between notation and improvisation I sought to articulate. A layout built around a sticky media gallery made it possible to represent audio, video, scores, and verbal text as dynamic partners in my arguments. Thirdly, personal experimentation with web tools and collaboration with a professional designer not only led to a satisfactory execution of the design strategy. They also clarifed and enriched the research process itself by requiring deeper refection on connections between form and content, verbal text and multimedia, and theory and practice.

I hope that this personal experience outlines some common issues in writing a native digital dissertation and thus helps other PhD students to determine whether, and how, to write their own. Zooming out, I hope these feld notes show how AR can contribute to discussions around digital publishing in academia more generally. The case of TP exemplifes Schwab's claim that

artistic research might ofer a point of reference for any form of contemporary research, because an understanding of the impact of the presentation format not only enhances the communicative powers of a research project, but also shapes the research process and is refected in its fndings.17

17 Michael Schwab, 'The Research Catalogue: A Model for Dissertations and Theses', in *The SAGE Handbook of Digital Dissertations and Theses*, ed. by Richard Andrews et al. (London: SAGE, 2012), pp. 339–54 (p. 339).

Zooming out further still, I hope TP suggests how the marriage of AR and digital publishing might fuel new forms of public intellectualism beyond the orbits of academia and the art world. TP was not only a dissertation to be defended and shelved; it is a living meta-work which continues to engage a wide variety of thinkers, practitioners and even popular media.18 Though TP's scope is of course limited, it, nonetheless, publicly entangles creativity and critical thought in a medium where they are in shorter and shorter supply. Tomorrow's PhD students would do themselves and the world a favor by redressing that scarcity.

#### Bibliography

18 Julian Cowley, 'Choose Your Own Route' (April 2017), *The Wire*, p. 16.

#### Chapter 2

Fig. 1 Visual map of paths created by Storyspace. Image by Cheryl E. Ball (2000), CC-BY. 27

#### Chapter 3

#### Chapter 9

#### Chapter 12

#### Chapter 13

# Index

*Academe* 2 academia 1, 6, 9, 14, 25, 28–29, 44, 59, 66–69, 86, 119, 126, 135, 139, 145–146, 154, 159–160, 162–163, 168, 172, 178, 243–244, 248, 253, 258–260 Academia.edu 58, 143, 145, 162–163 accessibility 11, 83–84, 86–91, 96, 98, 100, 133, 137, 139, 170, 250 'Access/ibility: Access and Usability for Digital Publishing' 88 actor-network theory (ANT) 55–57 Adema, Janneke 139, 145 Adobe Cloud 13 Adobe Flash 43, 45 advertising 12, 119–122 American Historical Association (AHA) 74, 124 *American Quarterly* 107, 109 'Towards a Critically Engaged Digital Practice: American Studies and the Digital Humanities' 107 American Studies Association 107 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 79, 83, 86, 167 *An Ethical Framework for Library Publishing* 87 Antonijevic, Smiljana 69 archive 2, 10, 12–13, 26, 29, 31–32, 36–38, 46, 50–51, 53–62, 84, 89, 103, 109, 115, 119, 121–122, 126, 131–132, 134, 138–139, 173–174, 177, 180, 187, 238–240, 243–245, 254 archivist 11, 28, 69, 173, 240 art 33, 67, 69–70, 73, 75, 80, 187, 200–201, 241, 248, 253, 260 art-based research 33, 67, 70, 73, 80 assessment 1–2, 7, 10, 39, 46–47, 72, 93–94, 107, 141, 201 Association of Departments of Foreign Languages 73

Astruc, Alexandre 135, 212 Ball, Cheryl 46, 78 Baraka, Amiri 156, 158 Bateson, Gregory 212–213 Beatles, The 219, 223, 226, 228–230 *Abbey Road* 226 'Blackbird' 219 'Strawberry Fields Forever' 223, 226 Bepress 177–178, 181 Berlin Wall 228 Berners-Lee, Tim 13 Berry, Kathleen 231 blogging 21, 67, 77, 94, 112, 130, 142–143, 146–147, 152, 156, 162, 176, 254 Boese, Christine 52, 125 Borgdorff, Henk 248–249 bricolage 13, 205, 209, 215–216, 223, 231–233 Brier, Søren 13 Brown University 77, 80, 177 Bruffee, Kenneth 157 Cairn (publishing platform) 193 Cardew, Cornelius 256 *Treatise* 256 Carson, A. D. 2, 113 *Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics Of Rhymes & Revolutions* 113 Catherine of Siena 179–180 CD-ROM 26 *Chicago Manual of Style, The* 244 Cibbora, Claudia 232 cinema 13, 36, 62, 109, 129, 135–136, 140–141, 147, 174, 205, 209, 211–215, 219, 231–233, 253 Cirasella, Jill 167, 171 citability 85, 95

	- CUNY Academic Works 165–166, 176–179, 181
	- digital/nontraditional 1–3, 7–10, 14, 25, 28–34, 36–38, 43–44, 49, 51–62, 67–68, 70, 72–73, 76, 78, 83, 85, 87,

91, 103, 108, 110–112, 114–117, 121, 124–126, 130, 132, 138, 142, 144, 146, 170, 179, 182, 208, 237, 239, 242–244, 246–247, 259

feminism 41, 129 Ferreras-Fernández, Tránsito 172–173 film. See cinema Finger, Anke 46 Fiore, Quentin 210 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen 5, 78, 139, 156 *Planned Obsolescence* 139 Flusser, Vilém 4, 75–76 'Flusser 2.0: Remediating Images, Reimagining Text' 75–77 *Flusser Studies* 4, 75 France 12, 124, 187, 189, 193, 197, 201 Freie Universität Berlin 129, 133 Friedman, Ken 257 Fulcrum (publishing platform) 85 Fuller, Matthew 65–66 Gannon, Kevin 5 *Radical Hope* 5 genre 7, 14, 28, 30–33, 40–41, 67–68, 86, 95, 129, 139, 151, 211 Geographical Information Systems (GIS) 120 George Mason University (GMU) 112, 237, 242 German Society for Media Studies (GfM) 143 Germany 131–132, 135, 141, 144, 146, 224–225 Gill, Graeme 221 Giroux, Henry 5 Git 175, 180–181, 197–198 GitHub 98, 161, 175, 179–180, 197–198 GitLab 175, 197 GNU Project 98, 169 Goldberg, David Theo 157 Goldstein, Malcolm 253 Google Docs 152, 158, 162 Google Scholar 172, 178 Grant, Catherine 135 guqin (instrument) 248 Hall, Gary 139, 163 'Open Book' 139 Halliday, Michael 206–207

Handa, Carolyn 154 hardware 99–100 HASTAC 112, 124, 152, 162, 176 Hawkins, Ann 178 Hollywood 43, 129 hooks, bell 5, 178 *Teaching to Transgress* 5 HTML 13, 29, 32, 40, 188, 194, 198, 251 humanities digital humanities (DH) 3, 29–30, 32–35, 49–50, 53–54, 58, 60–62, 68–69, 71–80, 83–86, 88–90, 99, 109–110, 114, 116–117, 165, 167, 172, 175, 179–182 public humanities 12, 21–23, 94, 151–153, 161–163, 166–167, 176, 182, 240, 243–245 Humanities Commons 49, 60–62, 162, 176 Huma-Num 121 Humboldt University 168 HuMetricsHSS 87 hypertext 25–26, 31, 75, 192, 200 i-Docs Symposium 136 InDesign 13, 189, 194, 197 infographic 205–206, 233 Ingold, Tim 220 *Life of Lines, The* 220 Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML) 33, 39, 46 institutional repository (IR) 29 Institutional Review Board (IRB) 55, 175 intellectual property (IP) 6, 97, 242, 244, 246 interface 57, 61, 101, 121–122, 137, 154, 194–196, 198, 200, 250 internet 6, 28–29, 84, 137, 168–169, 175, 202, 210, 217, 243, 251 *[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies* 136 Iron Curtain 230–231 Ives, Maura 179 JavaScript 180, 254 Jenkins, Henry 157 *Journal for Artistic Research* 30, 48, 250

*Journal of Sonic Studies* 250 JPG 37, 71 *Kairos* 29, 31, 33, 45, 48, 88 Keynote (software) 210 Kilcer, Emily 168 Kimball, Miles 179 Kincheloe, Joe 231 knowledge design 9, 68 knowledge production 4–5, 9, 13–14, 66, 80, 130, 152, 159, 168, 215, 233 Kuhn, Virginia 2, 52, 67, 124–125, 144 Leaky Studio 253 Lee, Kevin B. 135 Lenin, Vladimir 223–225 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 215, 218, 223, 233 librarian 10–11, 26, 28–30, 46, 53, 55, 69, 78, 83–84, 87–88, 90–91, 94–95, 102, 173, 179–180, 182, 240 library 28–29, 85, 87, 89, 139, 165, 174, 188, 240, 245 Library Publishing Coalition 87 Linux 169 literacy 11, 38, 135 *Literary Studies in the Digital Age* 74 Liu, Alan 71, 78 Lodel (software) 193 Lourie, Richard 223 Lynch, Michael P. 77 Manifold (publishing platform) 85 March of Dimes (MOD) 13, 238–241, 243, 245 Mattern, Shannon 71 'Evaluating Multimodal Work, Revisited' 71 Maturana, Humberto 223 Maudet, Nolwenn 198 McCready, Kate 89 McLuhan, Marshall 80, 210 *Gutenberg Galaxy, The* 80 McPherson, Tara 135 meaning-making 13, 32–33, 214, 219, 233 MediaCommons Press 133 MediArXiv 138

Medium (website) 162

Levels of Digital Preservation 89, 99

*Les espaces de communication. Introduction à la sémio-pragmatique* 147

	- digital/nontraditional 6, 25, 30, 53, 66, 83–84, 86–90, 125, 143, 165, 239, 247–248, 258–260
	- non-digital/traditional 6, 66–67, 138, 140, 142, 145
	- open access 3, 10, 12, 23, 28–31, 51, 53–54, 60, 62, 129–132, 135, 143, 145, 147, 165–167, 169–174, 176–179, 181–182, 250, 253
	- print-on-demand (POD) 133–134, 138, 140, 146–147
	- self-publishing 130, 140, 143, 145, 147–148
	- digital 1, 3–4, 6–11, 14, 25, 28, 30–32, 36–41, 46–48, 50–51, 53–54, 58–59, 61–62, 66–70, 72–80, 83–84, 86, 88, 90, 111–112, 115, 117, 119, 125, 144, 237, 241, 245
	- born-digital 1, 7, 10, 31, 37, 39–40, 45, 49–54, 59, 62, 67, 72, 108, 121 dissemination of 3, 8–9, 12–13, 28, 49,
	- 58, 62, 121, 133, 139–140, 168–169, 173, 243–244
	- multimodal 3–4, 8–10, 13, 32, 46, 65, 67, 70–71, 74–77, 107, 113, 115, 135, 137, 205, 207–209, 216, 218–219, 223, 228, 237
	- non-digital 6–7, 58, 112
	- radical 10, 14, 34

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee 38, 52 usability 83, 86–88, 90–91, 95–96, 98, 137 user experience (UX) 53–54, 56, 59, 61 Varela, Francisco 223 *Vectors* 136 versioning 8, 197 Vimeo 4, 75 Virginia Commonwealth University 25 Virginia Tech 25, 50–51 Visconti, Amanda 112 visualization 75, 108–109, 120, 166, 180, 232 Vitali-Rosati, Marcello 201

Wardrip-Fruin, Noah 156 Wark, McKenzie 156 web design 13, 253, 257–259 Wikimedia Commons 174 Woodhead, Leslie 228–230 *How The Beatles Rocked the Kremlin* 228 WordPress 13, 72, 85, 114, 134, 193, 253 World War II 238 Wresch, William 157 YouTube 35, 216

*Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft* 143 Zeoli, Michael 177 Zuboff, Shoshana 159

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# eDiteD by Virginia Kuhn anD anKe Finger Shaping the Digital DiSSertation

### KnowleDge proDuction in the artS anD humanitieS

#### eDiteD by Virginia Kuhn anD anKe Finger

Digital dissertatons have been a part of academic research for years now, yet there are stll many questons surrounding their processes. Are interactve dissertatons signifcantly diferent from their paper-based counterparts? What are the efects of digital projects on doctoral educaton? How does one choose and defend a digital dissertaton? This book explores the wider implicatons of digital scholarship across insttutonal, geographic, and disciplinary divides.

The volume is arranged in two sectons: the frst, writen by senior scholars, addresses conceptual concerns regarding the directon and assessment of digital dissertatons in the broader context of doctoral educaton. The second secton consists of case studies by PhD students whose research resulted in a natvely digital dissertaton that they have successfully defended. These early-career researchers have been selected to represent a range of disciplines and insttutons.

Despite the profound efect of incorporated digital tools on dissertatons, the literature concerning them is limited. This volume aims to provide a fresh, up-to-date view on the digital dissertaton, considering the newest technological advances. It is especially relevant in the European context where digital dissertatons, mostly in arts-based research, are more popular.

*Shaping the Digital Dissertaton* aims to provide insights, precedents and best practces to graduate students, doctoral advisors, insttutonal agents, and dissertaton commitees. As digital dissertatons have a potental impact on the state of research as a whole, this edited collecton will be a useful resource for the wider academic community and anyone interested in the future of doctoral studies.

This is the author-approved editon of this Open Access ttle. As with all Open Book publicatons, this entre book is available to read for free on the publisher's website. Printed and digital editons, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com

Cover photo by Erda Estremera on Unsplash, htps://unsplash.com/photos/eMX1aIAp9Nw Design by Anna Gat

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 Kuhn an

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Shaping

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Shaping the Digital

KnowleDge proDuction in the

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DiSSertation