Methodology
Follow the Thing
In this article, I am presenting my case study research on Pathfinders as a way to understand the media-specificity of publishing and reading born-digital publications in academia. To get a well-rounded understanding of Pathfinders, I use a triangulation of methods called 'Follow the Thing', which I take from Stephanie de Smale who was inspired by Actor Network Theory, the Playful Mapping Collective, and Mike Craig and Ian Cook. The 'Follow the Thing' method is characterized by the researcher's consideration of the various stages of a research subject, following the 'thing' from conception to consumption. The stages in my 'thing' are Scalar, Pathfinders authorship, the Pathfinders book and Pathfinders readership. The 'Follow the Thing' method allows me to combine a central focus on 'the thing' with a necessary contextual approach. It is a continuous reminder to incorporate the various levels of production and consumption as manifested in the text. 'Follow the Thing' can combine various methodologies, in my case including qualitative interviews, textual analysis, and literature research. From my research, I identified four themes that ran through each stage of 'following the thing': platform adoption, institutional embedding, the technological context, and documentation as a research value. In this thematic division, I draw on research from all the 'follow the thing' stages.
Traversals and interviews
This article is born-digital, as it was fitting to mimic the methodology of Pathfinders by doing Traversals and interviews in order to understand Pathfinders. During a Traversal, a participant (the work's author or a reader) is filmed while encountering the born-digital work while verbalizing their choices and interpretation of the work. Afterwards, the participant is interviewed about their experience with writing or reading the work. My first participant was Dene Grigar, one of the authors of Pathfinders. During the interview, Grigar mentioned that the number of hits on the Pathfinders webpage far exceeded the electronic literature community. For this reason, I chose reader participants with varying degrees of experience with electronic literature. Maud Ceuterick is a postdoc scholar in digital culture at the University of Bergen (Norway) with a background in film studies. Lisa van Vark has an academic background in comparative literary studies and currently works on the administrative staff of Utrecht University (The Netherlands). As the institutional embedding of the book was an emerging theme, I also opted for a Traversal with Rachel Di Cresce, a digital project librarian at the University of Toronto (Canada).As I use the various Traversals and interviews throughout the article when they are relevant to the thematic structure, it is necessary to contextualize the method first. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, I opted for Zoom Traversals and interviews. Each participant received a protocol that outlined the structure of the Traversal ahead of their session. These protocols were adapted versions of the "Author's Traversal Protocol" and "Readers' Traversal Protocol" of Pathfinders. During the session, I introduced my research topic of born-digital academic platforms briefly. During the Traversals, the participants shared their screen while reading Pathfinders and narrated their choices, reactions, and reflections. Participants were free to set their own pace and read/watch the content they are interested in. After the Traversals, I interviewed the participants about their experience with the work and their ideas about born-digital publication.
Throughout this article, I include citations as well as various video fragments from the Traversals and interviews. The videos complement the article text by giving a richer representation of the experiences of Pathfinders.
