Part 1: Scholarship, Research, and Professionalization
The first five chapters in this collection focus on scholarship, research, and professionalization, as the title of Part I suggests. The chapters in this section make an argument for collaborative research, explore a number of methodologies for collaboration in digital spaces, and look at how collaboration in digital spaces is changing the way graduate students are prepared for future work. Focusing on the larger, theoretical implications, this first half of the book creates a basis for the call for collaborative work.
While each chapter in this section used some functionality of the digital publication, much of the embedded media runs the risk of simply being links to transcripts. Each chapter includes transcripts for media with an audio element to make the text accessible, but as discussed in the review of Chapter 1, embedded videos only function when readers download the book or individual chapters and open them in Adobe Reader. This a free and standard software, but many readers may find it easier to simply read the PDF chapters within their web browsers. Because of that, some of the collaborative voices are literally silenced. Having said that, the cover of the book does state this software requirement, and even if the literal voices aren't heard, the messages of the collaborators in the videos are. Even with this weakness, the benefits of this section outweigh this drawback.
The strength here rests in the theoretical framework provided by the section as a whole. Nearly every chapter in this section, and the book as a whole, is authored collaboratively to some degree. Not only do the chapters stand as examples of collaborative work, but Part I speaks to the methodological, theoretical, and pedagogical implications of collaboration.
