Ephemera, Chapter Three: Some Failures and Revisions to Research Methods
Each chapter of Living Digital Media includes behind-the-materials that I made or saved while composing this project and the chapter. Journal entries, audio outtakes, snippets of code, conversations—I call these ephemera because they’re materials that are often discarded or abandoned when I move closer to a final publication. Living Digital Media's "Ephemera” sections, however, work against my tendencies to discard project materials over time. Waste not. Some materials were made in anticipation of this section, while others simply surfaced when I was composing. Nevertheless, I hope it’s useful for anyone who does or is interested in this doing digital work.
Ephemera, Chapter Three focuses the pain and pleasure of interviewing participants and revising parts of the book.
Generous Participants
I want to be totally honest: creators have been so generous with their time speaking to me about their books, comics, and games—often for little to no pay. Interviews can be exhausting for all parties involved, from the scheduling to the interview itself to the follow-up afterwards. Qualitative research demands exhaustion in service of ethics. That said, Chapters Two and Three were largely composed remotely and with remote interviews and methods. It took a considerable amount of time to make that happen, as opposed to taking a person-on-the-street approach at, say, the annual conferences like the Rhetoric Society of America Conference (RSA) or the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC). Also, even if a creator had refused compensation for doing an interview, I still tried to reciprocate in some way, and not just by telling their story in this book. In some cases, I played their games and left reviews; sometimes, I was asked to simply spread the word about their work on social media to students and fellow researchers. As suggested in the introduction to this book, this method reflected that of Jim Ridolfo’s “practitioner stories.” Writing about interviewing activists about their delivery practices, Ridolfo (2012) argues that “we cannot rely on merely studying the location of texts at different points in time (movement and speed) as a means to understand delivery in the twenty-first century” (p. 127). My translation: ground-level research is a slower but fulfilling method for understanding the rhetorical-affective practices of creators as told by those creators.
Audio Fails
Inevitably, interview recordings can and will fail when doing qualitative research. Once when I was interviewing a scholar in 2018, I recorded the entire interview with QuickTime, and Skype failed to enable my built-in microphone to capture the audio. The result was a silent conversation about digital composing. The same thing happened again when I interviewed Carter Lodwick and Ian Endsley about their collaborative practices. Here is a video clip of what I mean:
Figure 20
When Audio for an Interview Goes Wrong
Video: The author is displaying his screen, the game Wide Ocean Big Jacket, and the video feed of two game developers, Carter and Ian.
Sound (Rich speaking): Mmm...yeah! ... Now, did you happen to learn that the hard way—that you shouldn't be too ambitious? [Laughs.]
By fall 2020, I had developed a number of tools and practices that prevented similar errors in audio recording. Skype had enabled audio capturing, and Zoom had a feature for capturing and rendering two or more participants’ audio feeds. This feature is nice because a host can mix the tracks in post-production, especially if a participant’s audio feed is quiet.
Still, Zoom has its faults. In one case, for a digital article, a research assistant and I recorded two, one-hour conversations about a research project. After recording the second hour, we realized that Zoom deleted the prior recordings in the same folder, without warning. That meant we lost the first hour. It’s a mundane thing to point out, but these little fails add up and often go unacknowledged in the final product of a publication.
Preparation Fail
In the early stages of this research, I was called out during an interview. And it was no one’s fault but my own. I was interviewing a developer about his experimental game, but before the interview, I didn’t carve out time to play the game. He noticed, and he called me out. Here is my stumbling during that interview. For privacy purposes, I’m just providing the transcript:
Rich: The game’s coming out in October, right?
Developer: It came out last year. You gotta check the actual page [of the game’s website].
Rich: Okay, right.
Developer: Sorry, I get a sense that you don’t know much about the game.
Rich: That’s funny. I do know about it. I’ll be totally honest, I’m coming at it pretty early. But I think, in a way, it’s useful because, you know, it’s, it’s sort of like, I’m not too deep into it.
Developer: We have the [development blog] on the development. There’s a lot of information out there. I think it might be easier if I just provided the links, because that has all the visual references.
This research failure reminded me a lot of Luke Burbank’s interview with Icelandic band Sigur Rós for NPR’s Bryant Park Project. The 2007 interview made headlines, even a retrospective on NPR, for being one of the worst interviews with musicians in media history (BPPNPR). The interview highlights the push and pull of doing interviews with creators—they have to want to be there, and you have to value their time by showing up prepared by reading prior interviews, playing their media, etcetera. Burbank and I, you could say, had some homework to do.
Despite some hiccups that happen in the research process, failure can be funny in hindsight—and perhaps even a talking point during an interview. The developer and I left on good terms, and his suggestions for how to prepare ahead of time when speaking with game developers definitely helped me as I conducted more.
A Revision Toward More Storytelling
In summer 2021, I was at a bit of a standstill with telling stories in Chapters Two and Three. I had the topic on lock, but I felt the content was lacking some life, some stories of creators. This video is a short clip of me talking about the challenge of storytelling. Thinking aloud like this became the lifeblood of the book. Ultimately, with my colleague's advice, I ended up going deeper into some creators' stories and contextualizing those with additional stories.
Figure 21
Questioning Manuscript Revisions
Video: The author displaying his tablet screen, which shows the text of a chapter in progress.
Sound (Rich Shivener speaking):All right. So this book, you know, Chapter Two, it's all about stories, right? It's getting into the stories. The one thing that I'm really struggling with—and I wanted you to read it before I told you how I was feeling about it—is that I don't know if I should just stay with one or two stories, and then layer those with more comments. That's kind of what I promise in this first section, or [do I] just tell a range of [stories] and try to come up with the larger themes? That's the thing is: I'm super struggling with that. I think it's a thing that plagues me, because I think this was largely done remotely. And so I didn't have a chance to really sit down extensively with these creators. But it's something….I could, like, just focus on Justin. I could focus on someone else and tell an entire 2,000-3000 words on just their story. I don't know. So what do you think about that versus, like, what you're currently seeing?
Highlight Video from 100 Days of Writing: Livestreaming My Reading of Editorial and Reviewer Letters
Finally, this "Ephemera” part of Chapter Three ends with a highlight reel of my stream on Twitch called "100 Days of Writing.” Feel free to check the full archive of the series on YouTube. Responding to my own call for showing our revision work, this final video highlights my reading and response to the editors and reviewers of my first submission to the press. In this video, I read through the document and respond in line, also displaying parts of the book’s design.
Figure 22
Discussing Revision Plans on a Livestream
Video: The author is displaying his webcam and screen.
Sound (Rich Shivener speaking): And today, I'm gonna do more of that [coding work] in a bit. But the first thing that happened I want to tell everybody about is I got some notes back from editors. And what I'm kind of working through now is some of the responses and so forth. So I thought that might kind of be interesting, just to show what that process is like. And what I really liked about this editorial team that I'm working with currently, is that it's like a dialogue, right? It's not just a one-time delivery, get feedback. Thanks. But no, thanks. It's a very generous system.
Sound (Rich): You know, and, you know, with the, there's never a guarantee that this thing will be published. Don't get me wrong, I think that just because editors are so open with you doesn't mean they can't change their mind, right? They're trying to help you get to the finish line, in a lot of ways with these projects. And I think that, for a lot of editorial projects, this seems like a good approach, one that I wish we did more often where we're kind of mentoring through the process and saying, "Listen, if you meet these kinds of standards, through feedback, and so forth, and you kind of navigate carefully what reviewers asking for, you have a pretty good shot of feeling better about this process." So I'm gonna do that for a bit, I'll probably get back into Scrivener a little bit later on. So I think this was kind of working somewhat yesterday on the stream. But we got a lot of stuff done on this chapter too. And so yeah, just kind of working through each of those even did some handwriting. So it might be kind of a multimodal stream today while I'm just working out these various parts, I found to that actually,
Sound (Rich): just hiding from the screen for a bit and doing this a bit more in the morning, and then bringing it to the stream to write it up and talk through it, and so forth makes for probably a more productive day generally. And to show up on the stream and just write with having a little bit of a plan or no plan at all, typically isn't the most productive for me, and maybe for for everyone else. So yeah, definitely got a little more energy after I added some of those barriers yesterday. And yeah, still excited to continue writing for the rest of the month. So let's look at what we got here for a bit. I'm gonna go ahead start my timer, because I want to try to get this response down within 25 minutes or so because it's just a couple questions that they have. So, you know, I responded to them with some
Sound (Rich): thoughts on what I thought about the reviewer feedback and how I was going to work from it. I don't think I have that handy on me at the moment. I'd have to dig it up to show you. But basically, what I had said was, you know, "I agree with all the feedback and think that was on a previous stream too. And here's what I was going to change, or here's what I was sort of working through." The reviewers had said things like, we'd like the full audio production that you've delivered for this project. And I can show you kind of what it looks like, in theory right now, the prototypes have been putting out, I haven't worked out so much on this side just yet. Or not just yet. But for a bit, I, you know, just kind of delayed that. But let me just pull this up. Let's see. Prototype book. Okay, so this was, you know, a bit of what we were seeing before
Video: The author is still displaying his webcam and screen. He opens a new webpage that features the words "Feeling Collaboration."
Sound (Rich): the projects, and you know, I've got, like, multimedia files, and so forth. I mean, a lot of things aren't even placed on here just yet, because, again, I was sending the sample parts of the book, but I have these chapters and these audio files kind of up top. And later on, in the versions that are now in their hands, you've got audio, that kind of sticky player that's listed here. And that's another thing I sort of talked about on the stream a while ago. I think it was mostly like last summer, I was working on some of the stuff. It is a long haul, by the way, working on a massive book project.
Sound (Rich): And even if it's not massive, doing something for the web, doing it as a digital book, is almost like a doubling effect, because you're working on the text, and you're doing some of this hard coding. So you're basically temporary publisher until it's gone through the review process. So I had sort of responded in that way to to the project and said, you know, "This is what I'm doing and here's what I'm planning to do. What do you think? Various things like, "look to do a bit more framing." Get a lot of things, sort of taken care of in that, and then just do some kind of in good faith, kind of inline editing and so forth, which yes, absolutely, we want to do all that kind of stuff. So yeah, I got a nice letter back. Here's what he's planning to do. And now the editors come back and they have a good, good letter about sort of synthesizing what I'm saying and what they think about that plan, basically, before I resubmit it by the end of summer. So a couple things to consider there. We were saying... we had talked about the full audio versus abridged audio for this book. So I have two choices here. One is...
Sound (Rich): I could treat this book like a storytelling podcast, where I've written all the scripts, this is how it started. Every section has narration to it. This is what I originally envisioned. And I think that's, I think it was well received. The question was about timing, and whether that's what readers might want. So there was a suggestion that maybe an abridged version of the audio and the full length one can be good for readers if they want kind of pathways and choices.And so as I was saying, "Here, rather than a bridged audio, instead of full audio, you could potentially use both as long as readers are clear about what they're accessing. Let us know what you think of this idea." So what I'm kind of working through now is going to write for this for a couple of minutes is ... what the main challenges [are], like, when I'm trying to prioritize, and so forth. So I'm gonna kind of write to this for a minute and just put that out there ...