Follow the Pathfinders: a Case Study Approach to Production, Use, and Readership on Scalar

Concluding remarks

Publishing academic work on born-digital platforms does not simply produce what could have been written on paper. Rather, the media specificity of works influences the production, text, and readership. While media specific analysis has become common place in various studies of creative digital artifacts, analysis of born-digital academic publications could enhance the understanding of these particular texts as well as contribute to a more intricate application of media specificity. Academia's customs of producing and circulating knowledge include ways of writing, citing, reviewing, publishing and reading. Referencing styles, for example, can be interpreted as indicators of quality and use of jargon makes publications comprehensible to an in-crowd. As publication is a primary and principal mode through which scholars get to know each other's works and build their field, scrutiny of their medial mode is necessary to understand the field.

I have investigated the processes and influences of media specificity in the intellectual intervention of the book project Pathfinders. Rather than an isolation of the media-text itself, my contextual 'Follow the Thing' approach allows me to reflect on media specificity as implemented within a medial and academic network. A platform such as Scalar has various affordances to accommodate multimedial and multilinear research, allowing both authors and readers to familiarize themselves with a common structure of research and publication. At the same time, the users can choose which elements to adopt and appropriate to suit their needs and ideas. The institutional embedding influences how authors choose and approach their medial content as well as how the book is circulated and read. Readers consider academic validity through a combination of their evaluation of content and their other experiences with born-digital publications. What follows is the technological influence in the form of the "metainterface" which extends the book beyond one self-contained text. Readers can cross to relevant external websites using the hyperlinks or encounter elements of the work through other channels before entering the book. This inevitably leads to differences in interpretations by different readers, which is a practice that the explicit role of different platforms highlights and invites. The central focus on situational and networked documentation foregrounds the value of documentation and presentation of sources as research. The spontaneity and interpretation are integral parts of what is presented as a documentation of a work.

Just as Pathfinders represents, in Di Cresce's words, a "network of relationships", so the book's medial mode itself can only be understood within a network of relationships. Media specificity is deeply tied to production and use of platforms, the institutional embedding, the technological ecology, and the promotion of research values. To discover how a medial mode influences (academic) media-texts, follow the thing through every stage of its production and circulation.
 

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