A transdisciplinary protocol for digital scholarship

While the field of digital humanities continues to evolve and expand, the affordances of the digital medium are becoming increasingly applicable to research in the field of education. This article provides an overview of some of the issues involved with publishing educational research as a digital web-based thesis. It also introduces the term multimodal theses and dissertations (MTDs) and reports on a Ph.D. research project which is an early example of an MTD in the field of education. The purpose of this article is three-fold: (1) to stand on the shoulders of those in the digital humanities to expand the growing field of digital scholarship to include education; (2) to report on a range of unanticipated affordances arising from the MTD format in addition to the obvious benefits of ease of use, embedded media, and functionality; (3) to propose a transdisciplinary protocol for digital scholarship to assist researchers, librarians, and graduate school administrators in various disciplines.