Map Pattern Interpretations
Before proceeding, it is crucial to reiterate the Mapping Digital Technology in Rhetoric and Composition History project's methodological underpinnings. The project does not envision the goal of history-making to be the production of a monolithic metanarrative; history-making is an exercise in establishing defensible stories—not revealing the story. The project does not establish a sanctified canon of places that have been prime movers in online scholarship in the field, nor does it address which institutions have approached digital technology effectively and which have not. This pilot study does not present a hegemonic narrative regarding what its maps reveal but instead interprets coherent patterns in the data with the understanding that equally valid counter-interpretations are possible (if not inherent). Data are rhetorically determined entities, as are their representations. Maps of other data sets produced under the Mapping Digital Technology in Rhetoric and Composition History project's auspices that track conferences, publications, dissertations, awards, and other field aspects with geographical associations would reveal different activity patterns and new profiles of institutional investment. This pilot study thus seeks to open a multivocal discourse rather than establish monolithic conclusions.
This orientation is not a postmodern equivocation but a concerted epistomological move away from the quixotic search for certainty and toward probability and effect. The Mapping Digital Technology in Rhetoric and Composition History project's central historical question ultimately is not "What happened?" but rather "What productive knowledge about the past may be discerned and what are its implications?" It is in this spirit that the following sections discuss sample findings from the pilot data set based on coherent patterns in its PPSM and CMM.