4.2.2: Designing Legibility

Early proposals for the OOPP contained the same feature set: 1) the use of links to produce a non-linear document (0.2.3), 2) mouseover functionality for text so that it could include definitions for a multi-disciplinary audience (X.2.2), and 3) two separate opacity functions—one for text and one for images (4.3.2; 4.3.3; X.2.1). These proposals were written with my dissertation committee in mind, working from the simplest to the most complex features in respect to the rhetorical affordances of digital technologies. I wanted the committee to know that the main functionality was actually quite simple—a Jekyll-based platform for GitHub which Kalani Craig had already developed (4.1.1; X.2.3)—and that the work done for the dissertation were for legibility and access. Following the minimal computing turn in DH—which argues for computationally simple, accessible platforms in an explicit move to make the field more open to resource light institutions and scholars¹—I wanted both the platform and the argument associated with it to be available to a broader audience, rather than only the hyper-technical cadre often associated with the field (4.1.2).

This reflected the original interest in the digital dissertation: to find a way to navigate the interdisciplinarity of the project so that it was more accessible to potential readers. The non-linearity afforded by hyperlinks (0.2.3),² the organizing structure to cite other sections when evoked, and the open-access affordances of a public GitHub page spoke to a desire to articulate my argument through multiple avenues of interaction. The born-digital dissertation also afforded open access for under resourced colleagues, as it would not be published within ProQuest’s paywalled collections.³

The mouseover functionality became a bridge between this interest in accessibility, and a way to streamline the rhetorical argument. The dissertation was going to be non-linear, meaning there would need to be some way to define and describe important terms which readers might approach in a traditional introduction chapter (0.2.3). I wrote, in the proposal for the 2023 IDAH Summer Incubator, the dissertation

borrows from the fields of media studies, the digital humanities, postcolonial theory, the medical humanities, medical history, science and technology studies, death studies and others. I want my readers to be able to see how these fields enable generative scholarship when discussed in the same breath, and I do not want these discourses and arguments to be engaged in isolation, but instead in concert with one another.⁴

One of the problems that I encountered in writing this dissertation was a need to discuss and frame each aspect of each discipline in such a way as to show aptitude for relevant readers. Dissertations, as a genre, require some of this hand waving as a method to show the labor of years of research, as well as a way to fulfill somewhat nebulous learning goals implicit in the practice. To talk about any of the fields mentioned above in isolation, to discipline them in the little boxes of their discourse,⁵ assumes that they can be sequestered into a singular conversation, and diminishes how they can be engaged in concert.⁶ Discursive fluidity at multiple scales—from the structure of the dissertation, to the articulation of each section, to the way I write my sentences—helps manage these concerns.

These interdisciplinary affordances are one of the reasons why DH’s “big tent” has been so appealing to many in the past decades (4.1.2).⁷ Tara McPherson, who edited the interdisciplinary journal Vectors with Steve Anderson, presents a useful model for the potentials of an intermixed conversation, especially with aesthetic laborers and cultural scholars. She writes that multimodal scholarship argues

that hands-on engagement with digital forms reorients the scholarly imagination, not because the tools are cool or new (even if they are) or because the audience for our work might be expanded (even if it is), but because scholars come to realize that they understand their arguments and their objects of study differently, even better, when they approach them through multiple modalities and emergent interconnected forms of literacy.⁸

One concern, which implicitly weaves into my own approach to this interdisciplinarity, is whether any of it is legible to discourses outside of media studies.⁹ This is certainly an issue for DH, given how quickly working with digital platforms moves into questions of technical aptitude (4.1.2). Onboarding a scholar to the OOPP involves a few hours of introductions: how GitHub works, how to write in markdown (.md), where to place files, and why they are placed in those folders in the first place.¹⁰

My approach is very much indebted to the messy productivity of rhizomatic methods; the disciplinary intermingling I engage with intentionally echoes the Deleuzian¹¹ construct of the plateau—which Brian Massumi summarizes:

Each “plateau” is an orchestration of crashing bricks extracted from a variety of disciplinary edifices. They carry traces of their former emplacement, which give them a spin defining the arc of their vector. The vectors are meant to converge at a volatile juncture, but one that is sustained, as an open equilibrium of moving parts each with its own trajectory.¹²

Interdisciplinarity is necessary to a radical critique of enclosed disciplines, and it proliferates in certain critical traditions. These approaches enable an additive relationally—“and . . . and . . . and. . .”—which embrace things caught at the in-between; as Deleuze and Guattari write, “The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary it is where things pick up speed.”¹³

The emphasis on clarity, from the structure of the dissertation, to the way I try to write; however, rejects the more pernicious pomposity in the stylistics of Deleuze and his fans.¹⁴ While the academic inscrutability of Deleuze and Guattari’s original work is done with intention, this style alienates readers who are not already trained in and hip to the employed modes of argument. Disciplinary training, not unlike the kinds of training medical doctors were subject to in their schooling, is a mode of exclusion: it is a form of gatekeeping which defines who is qualified to do specific kinds of work, and who is qualified to be read in those fields (4.1.4). If humanists are to be interdisciplinary, then we first need to be willing to write in styles that are legible to the discourses in which we work and the communities whom we hope to engage; this is not because those styles are better, but because we need to show respect to our interlocutors, colleagues, and collaborators. We need to give them space to read, reflect, and respond, building a generative and collaborative community in the process.

I bring this problem forward for two reasons. First, I want to be upfront about some of my own stylistic concerns, because they maintain the same kinds of structures which produce value in academic settings (0.1.4). Science and technology studies (STS) scholars have long shown how academic arguments articulate a kind of fortification and entrenchment.¹⁵ I cannot be honest about my critiques of medicine without sharing the same skepticism to my home fields, and calling out when aesthetics are used to gatekeep.¹⁶

Second, when I have examined the work of scholars who are interested in research ethics, their research is intentionally plain spoken. This rhetorical position comes from their intentional inclusion of non-academic, often Indigenous, perspectives in their research programs. Kim TallBear and Max Liboiron articulate complex, critical scholarship in a bevy of communities both academic and not. Their communal interlocutors—especially for Liboiron, who practices community peer review¹⁷—are not academics, and are not trained in the kinds of reading practices which academic writing assumes, but their voices, and their potential refusal of Liboiron and the CLEAR Lab’s research (4.2.3), foregrounds an anticolonial methodology.¹⁸ Implicit in this work is a need to be upfront and honest with communal colleagues, who may not be trained in the disciplines in which Liboiron or TallBear work, but whose input and discussion is vital.

This dissertation is committed to being open: it is published on an open access platform, and it follows the guidelines of the minimal computing approach to DH.¹⁹ Implicit in this openness, and the refusal of capitalistic forms of academic publishing and technological buildup, is an access beyond academic spheres. DH’s embrace of blogs, Twitter (now X), and other open platforms was also an embrace of how public conversations could strengthen the field’s work.²⁰ If this is to be successful, though, it needs to be met with approaches that lower the bar to entry for scholars who are not in our unique fields. My attention to transparency²¹ in these regards is done with the hope to onboard more than the few scholars who are contractually obligated to read my writing, because those different perspectives deserve to be included in the conversation. It is respectful to write in ways that include rather than exclude (0.1.5). This framework of legibility helps to contrast with the main technological or epistemic intervention of the OOPP, the opacity functions from which it gets its name.