The Melancholy Odyssey of a Dissertation with Pictures

This informed opinion piece discusses the author’s dispiriting experience filing the first hybrid dissertation at Ohio University. “Document Format Checklist” guidelines enforced a “rhetoric of distance” between pictures and words—compulsory logos-centrism. Specifications for projects like the author’s that blend images with text did not exist, and staff responsible for document approval at her graduate college insisted that she follow their guidelines. While her advisers’ communications with the graduate college and council eventually resulted in revised guidelines that included two new options for filing multimodal dissertations, her project continued to meet resistance when she tried to file it following these new options.