Methodology

A Note on the Design of This Exhibit

This exhibit is designed to foreground the literacy narratives it analyzes. Taking advantage of its multimodal affordances as a born-digital text, I have embedded video clips throughout to incorporate the DALN narratives I analyze in their original video mode. Including video excerpts allows the narrators to speak for themselves—within the framing I provide—and, especially in the Performance section, the semiotic richness of the video narratives allows me to highlight paralinguistic features of the narratives to further explore the technological literacy identities narrators construct. In the Methodology section where I introduce the seven narratives I analyze, I link each narrative to its record in the DALN to allow exhibit viewers to watch the videos in their entirety and examine their metadata. The ability to make the primary source data I work with here accessible to exhibit viewers is one of the most valuable aspects of the DALN. Unlike most qualitative research projects where practical impediments and ethical regulations on research involving human subjects prevent scholars from being able to open data up for audience examination, the DALN’s informed consent process makes its narratives available to the public. This methodological context allows exhibit viewers to grapple with the data themselves and to interrogate the interpretations I offer here, as H. Lewis Ulman describes in his exhibit in this collection.

In terms of page design, the video clips are placed alongside the text that directly analyzes them, letting viewers choose whether to read my analysis first or watch the videos first. The analysis I offer is represented in “traditional paper format,” making extensive use of written text to analyze the video narratives. Especially given the scholarly genre of this publication, using written text to comment in detail on the narratives and theorize them in the context of existing literature seemed like the best way to make my interpretation accessible to an academic audience accustomed to approaching complex arguments in this mode. Unlike a print text, however, to facilitate screen reading I have divided the written text for the exhibit into one- or two-paragraph sized chunks to limit the amount of content on each page to about one screen-full. To help viewers read through these short chunks of text, I use back and forward arrows at the bottom of each page to let viewers move between pages within sections, while the navigation menu on the left lets viewers move between sections.

The exhibit takes advantage of its digital multimodal presentation format with several other important design features. The sections are color-coded to clearly distinguish them from one another and the body sections are also identified with a color-coded, hand-drawn graphic that visually represents the theme of each section. The use of a childlike, handwriting-style font—Kid TYPE Ruled—for the section headings and a hand-drawn, section-color-coded game board as the exhibit’s navigation map on its opening page visually situates the narratives I analyze in the contributors’ childhoods. The non-technological nature of the body section illustrations, the heading font, and the navigation map also point to an important, but subtle, detail that comes through in the stories the narrators tell about their early experiences with computers, discussed in the Details section: these childhood technology experiences are couched as part of the “normal” flow of school and play activities the narrators engaged in as children. Their depiction of widespread computer use in home and school settings characterized by play and social relationships is one of the generational touchstones I argue these narrators use to identify with their peers. These visual details are designed to gesture toward the relationship between the technological literacy experiences narrators describe and the wider literacy ecology in which they were situated as children.

The design for this exhibit strives to take advantage of the multimodal affordances of its digital medium and capitalize on its networked connectivity to connect my use of DALN narratives to their original context in the archive. I have composed and laid out the text in a way that balances the alphabetic text emphasis of scholarly publication with the material conditions of screen reading in an attempt to encompass the benefits of both modes. It is my hope that viewers find the process of navigating through my exhibit and engaging with its video media a seamless and meaningfully multiliterate experience.