Cautions

• Consider the project-wide design features that you'd like to implement in advance
• Don't get carried away by the exciting functionality of the technology and lose sight of your own rhetorical recovery goals
• Do embrace opportunities to change plans as you discover new functionality and features, opening yourself to a deepened understanding and engagement with your own research and methodologies

Conclusions

Our process of digital project creation allowed us to embrace the emergent and provisional relations between our recovered texts and ourselves as rhetorical scholars, and to really reflect on the political and ontological project of recovery that we were undertaking. We found in our own experience that working piecemeal and letting structure emerge was challenging but exciting and intellectually generative. We valued being able to capture and visualize the variety of approaches and diverse voices involved in producing a digital project like this, and decided for our own project not to smooth over that difference on a project-wide level. It revealed for us transformative insights about the potentially competing interests in recovering an author or text and engaging users in a reflection on the acts of recovery itself.

At the same time, upon reflection we suggest that users should ideally have a good sense of the project as a whole before they set out to produce work, reflecting as much as possible on the goals of recovery and user engagement for the project in advance, and considering how design decisions can facilitate or hinder those goals. If we were to engage the process again, we would see what additional scholarly insights were made available when some design elements were controlled by standardized vocabularies or tagging protocols.