 In April this year, I defended a literature dissertation that was unusual in its methodology and form, design, code, user testing, blogging, and a white paper written during the final few weeks before the defense. On top of using some digital humanities methods that are becoming more and more recognized and allowed as some part of a dissertation and as part of any non-dissertational scholarship though, my dissertation was possibly unique in its format and that these digital pieces were completely recognized as the full scholarship they were. And you can tell that this was the case because there was no protomonograph. There were zero written chapters. This really wasn't a case of someone being allowed to do some extra-digital scholarship as long as they did it in addition to a traditionally recognizable set of written chapters. I was lucky to have an incredibly positive digital dissertation experience which I'll tell you about more in a moment. Just though I want to rewind to three years earlier when I had a very brief roadblock to getting the dissertation off the ground, I knew that I wanted to design a dissertation this unusual way and so it made sense to talk to all the parties involved in deciding if I'd receive my doctorate before starting the work to make sure we were all onboarded on the same page about the project. I had the academic experience of writing my dissertation prospectus under my belt and the habit of summarizing my research thinking into 140 characters for Twitter so academic or concise writing weren't quite the problems. But for whatever reason, I got stuck trying to write just two little paragraphs to share with people like the librarian in charge of ingesting dissertations, two short paragraphs on the methods I wanted to use for my dissertation, why these were the best ways to pursue my research, and what the final deliverables would look like. I was just having a tough time and getting too up in my head about producing this explanation. I couldn't get my two paragraphs cut down enough. How did I use just two paragraphs to explain not only these what's and why's of my project and not just the critical thinking behind my use of content management systems, PHP, JavaScript, and other technical terms, but what each of those terms meant to the lay person as well in those two tiny paragraphs. So I was overthinking this a bit, and finally my advisor, Matthew Kirchenbaum, who I'll be introducing a bit later, gently pointed out that trying to explain PHP and JavaScript too, for example, my graduate school dean, wasn't actually an unusual activity or one that was an unfair extra burden of doing digital scholarship. One of the core purposes of the PhD is to bring junior scholars past the pool of shared community knowledge for their first time to refine your specialization and otherwise embark on a path where you'll have a lot of shorthand and a lot of terms of art that you'll always need to be able to explain to all but a handful of other people in the world if you want them to understand you. This was a useful moment for me as a scholar to cut off right there any sense of special solitude or extra burden caused by doing digital scholarship. The privilege of working with mentors like Matt is that I had a safe space to learn to be pedagogical about my work rather than defensive, to expect curious listeners instead of defensiveness and lack of understanding and to sometimes create curiosity about digital methods if it wasn't already there through this pedagogical approach. I share this anecdote because I'm hoping to do more today than just offer my dissertation as a model for student digital scholarship. Although there's an interesting conversation to be had around some of the particular special benefits of doing various types of digital dissertation work, I hope that our conversation during this session can start from, perhaps surprisingly, the many ways doing a digital dissertation is not special. That is, I'd like to see the conversation tend less toward comparing newer types of student research, especially those digital methods, to written chapters. And I'd like to see us moving the conversation more toward the reasons behind doing a dissertation in the first place. Every dissertating scholar, regardless of the methods and format they use, needs to think about the best methods and format for their scholarly argument. I'd like to see us be pedagogical about how the way we each choose to advance knowledge works. And instead of starting the conversation by focusing on written chapters, start talking instead around what we want the dissertation to do for a student and show about that student. And how, in this moment, we can use many different methods and forms in critical and scholarly ways to realize those goals. Next, I'm going to describe my recent dissertation and some thoughts about the current environment for digital dissertations. Then I'll hand the mic over to Dr. Matthew Kirchenbaum to talk a bit about digital dissertations from the perspective of advising them. Since I'm both a web developer and a literature PhD, I'm interested in how we can use interface design to encourage not just public consumption of, but active participation in humanities reading and interpretation, especially with digital editions of literary texts. Scholarly editors, those researchers who create scholarly editions of texts, are integral to the continuum that keeps the stories of the past available to and understood by the present. But there's also a less-served public of readers beyond the academy whose interest keeps the humanities alive and relevant. I'm especially interested in work that takes digitized and publicly available humanities resources and makes these truly accessible beyond just those people who are experts at formulating research questions and at using online resources to answer those questions. An example of this is the Library of Congress's online hosting of photographs taken across the U.S. during the Depression as part of a federal work program. This is a fantastic research offering that is theoretically public, but it took the photogrammer project creating an interface for intuitively exploring these photographs to truly open this piece of our cultural heritage to everyone. I'm interested in crafting humanities interfaces that help everyone get interested in our cultural heritage and that make getting involved and following up on curiosity intuitive through interfaces that make it obvious how to use them and that care about public participation in research thinking. Therefore my dissertation asks this question what if we build a digital edition and invite everyone including first-time readers students and others outside the academy to participate in its use. I consider this question by creating and testing the infiniteulises.com participatory digital edition of James Joyce's challenging novel Ulysses. As a brief tour of what that site looked like this is the current front page and those three big images give a high level tour of the edition's features. You can highlight parts of the book as you read it and annotate those highlights that is leave comments and questions. You can read the annotations left by other readers and you can personalize what annotations you see to your background your interests and your needs. On the screen is the reading interface of infiniteulises. My field of textual scholarship has a long history of building editions and experimenting with textual interfaces in order to critically explore and perform scholarly arguments a tradition that helped me argue for designing code as scholarship because of how closely this building and design tied into my research questions. The most productive and efficacious way to learn about and advance public participation in digital editions was to actually build an experimental digital edition with some new interactive features this infiniteulises.com site and then to analyze the edition's use. And so my dissertation consisted of the design work and web development and coding that created the infiniteulises digital edition. Part of my argument for the form of the dissertation was that scholars were theorizing how social digital editions might work more often than building these theories and actually assessing them. With eulises in particular scholars argued about whether hyper annotation would diminish or break the text but they hadn't tried to assess this through testing it out. Therefore various forms of user testing as well as quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results of these tests and of site use statistics were another deliverable of the dissertation. I used my research blog literaturegeek.com to write twice a month through the three years of the dissertation with posts that examined my research questions as well as meta-dissertational issues like questions of IP and copyright involved in my project. And finally I wrote a white paper just during the final month before the actual defense to act as a debriefing and analytical discussion of the dissertation experience. A place to analyze the results of my user testing and a public accounting of the new knowledge created by my research. Dr.AmandaVisconti.com served as the single representative website gathering all the pieces of the dissertation including archival recordings of the digital edition website and exports of websites, code and blog posts. This website was ingested into my university repository as a zip of its web files plus a one-page PDF abstract for the entire project. A big question with unusual dissertation methodologies is how will your work be understood and evaluated? The thing being evaluated with my project was the digital edition interface I created and how I addressed various theoretical questions both through this end product and through the regular blogging and final white paper debriefing that I wrote. My committee members weren't web developers but they are digital humanists, textual scholars with significant digital edition experience, user interface researchers and a joicin, a perfect set of expertise for evaluating an experimental Ulysses digital edition not on the level of critical code studies but of user interface. Another question is how will technical or specialized work be communicated to the researcher's audience? To address this question my advisor suggested I create a manifest documenting all the pieces of the dissertation in one place. This document explained each piece of work in lay terms, gave a sense of the depth of the work and the critical thought that went into it and linked to where to look at the actual work. This was also a perfect place to acknowledge and credit the collaborations in my research such as open source code like Drupal over their improvements to the annotated JavaScript tool that Stanford's Michael Weidner generously shared with me. A third challenge is how do we reduce the extra administrative time and effort that stems from unusual dissertational desire? There was extra work involved not just for me but also for my dissertation committee. My advisor Matthew Kirschenbaum and committee members Neil Freistat, Kerry Kraus, Melanie Kill, and Brian Richardson were all incredibly generous with their time and mentorship and met with me as a team multiple times throughout the three years of the project. Meeting as a team meant that we made better use of the dissertation committee than just drawing them in at the end. It turned a feedback on my project into a conversation among several areas of expertise. Meetings also let us reaffirm a mutual understanding of what the the deliverables at the time of the defense would look like and that the committee still found that this outcome satisfied the requirements of a dissertation in my department. I hope we can discuss today how we might provide the same degree of support and time commitment for both busy advisors and their advisees. Are there ways we can change our department's forms and templates to offload some of the work of checking in on the progress for dissertations when it can't be measured in chapters or drafts or to make sure faculty receive special credit or things like course and committee releases when they commit to this extra level of support for a student's unusual dissertation? My current university, Purdue, just officially made mentoring undergraduates a written piece of how it judges tenure and promotion cases and I'm hoping to see this extended to graduate mentorship as well. I'm going to focus on one particular event in the recent environment for digital dissertations now but I encourage you to check out the Zotero bibliography that I've built at tinyurl.com slash dh evaluation if you're interested in more examples of supporting digital dissertations and other digital scholarship. This includes discussions of recent events like CUNY's live streamed remix the dissertation symposium and relevant dissertations outside of humanities, namely Nick Susannes' recent dissertation entirely in comics form for an education phd at Columbia Teachers College. The guidelines for both partially and fully digital dissertations published by George Mason University's history and art history department this fall are hopefully assigned other universities and departments will start to give students scholars the freedom to choose the best form and methods of their contribution to academic knowledge. GMU's guidelines state developments in digital publication platforms and digital history methods have increasingly made it possible for graduate students to produce a culminating work of historical scholarship that does not take the form of narrative dissertation. They welcome dissertation projects that take a range of digital forms while also upholding the standards of the profession for good scholarly work. I like that the GMU guidelines are presented as porous guidelines that don't assume we know every form or method a scholar might judge appropriate to their research. The GMU guidelines are also fantastic and pointing back to the values behind a dissertation's design. Rather than asking is it written chapters or if not how like chapters can your dissertation be? This department has thought instead carefully about what the dissertation should do using in part the guidelines for scholarship of American Historical Association. For example the guidelines state that any dissertation should perform long-standing values of historical research like showing the significance of the research and justifying all methodological choices. Dissertators using forms or methods for which their scholarly community does not yet widely understand the nature of the critical process or deliverables should be responsible for educating others about these. My only quibble and it's a really small quibble with the GMU guidelines is that they put the extra burden on digital dissertators to argue for the aptness of their methods in forms. I disagree. All dissertators should argue for the aptness of their methods to their research questions regardless of if they're using a form or method that time has shown is generally a good way of pursuing research questions in that field. What matters is the appropriateness of method and form to your particular research questions. You want to choose how you best think through ideas and convey your critical thinking so that you end up with the best possible support for your scholarly argument. Digital or not dissertating scholars should ask themselves questions like what format best supports what you're arguing and best reaches the most people who can use and build on your work. If you used a different format for your dissertation what would be possible what would you lose and gain? And on the practical side of things what skills do you want to learn? Do your form and methods support your career plans? How will you deal with things like job applications that require long form writing samples? I'm glad that my dissertation experience counter some of the common objections to student work that innovates in form and method. It is not written in stone for example that you will not get any job or the kind of job you want including if that happens to be a troubled tenure-track position or that you won't be able to finish the PhD in five years. Using social media and eschewing an embargo can result in more people knowing about your work and more opportunities for collaboration and publication not less. And perhaps most importantly it is possible given the right circumstances to do a digital dissertation that fully recognizes your digital scholarship and doesn't require you to double your labor by producing anything digital as extra effort alongside the traditional multiple written chapters. I'd be remiss to not address those right circumstances though. Dissertators need permissions from ourselves and permission from our departments that this path can lead to success and I think as dissertations like mine and guidelines like GMUs proliferate more students will find this permission. Dissertators also need more environments that let them take risks and that recognize that these risks are not just intellectual ones but personal risks involving being able to provide for yourself and for your family to pay down student loans and find a job that will let you be happy. As departments begin to support more diverse forms of doctoral scholarship I hope we can use sessions like these to discuss how the greater scholarly ecosystem of universities, libraries, publishers and others can contribute to supporting these innovators once they've graduated. Thank you.