Making a video... is to engage in ritual -- both the rituals of new technologies and those of creating and structuring images. [R]ituals serve as a 'frame' whose stabilizing effect, experienced through repetition in cycles and in rhythmic recurrences, allows us to see things with a different intensity and...to perceive the ordinary in an extra-ordinary way.
 
[Prototype:] Prototyping is a physical technique of rearticulation. Prototypes manifest possibilities through the unique use of materials or invention of expressive modalities…[Iteration:] These steps are repeated until a social consensus is negotiated, or until a set of constraints imposes an end to the designing process.
 

In Designing Culture, Anne Balsamo outlines ten lessons about technoculture innovation (8). Many of the insights that Balsamo culls from her experiences as a cultural theorist and media designer are instructive in the creation of a digital dissertation. Balsamo states that “innovations… are better understood as assemblages of practices, materialities, and affordances” or as “hybrid socio-technical-cultural assemblages.” This definition of innovation highlights the complex network of influences that contribute to the shape and form of a multimodal dissertation. To rephrase Balsamo, a multimodal dissertation is not an object, it is “historically constituted” through an “articulatory and performative process” (9).  At present, the diversity of practice-based dissertation forms is increasing as more and more contributions are completed. This emerging, unsettled genre of scholarship exposes the socio-technical construction of the academic dissertation more broadly. Current challenges to the very construction of scholarship through digital media foreground issues of inscription, scholarly expressivity, and disciplinary conventions and rituals that are implicit concerns in all academic dissertations.
 
As I have been working on the topic of South Broadway for many years, the technological possibilities of how to approach the material, which disciplinary questions to pose, and in which media form to enact this inquiry have shifted as I have continued to research not as much the history of this street, as the multimodal historiographic possibilities of representing the research process itself. While the current iteration, ever in a state of revision and versioning, is the result of a cut catalyzed by imposed constraints, it aspires to show how multiple iterations and prototypes have left an imprint on its design.