Dedication
To my grandfather and to my Uncle Gee, who both passed away during the year of my project, but who left a legacy of memories and stories in the home that they, my father, and my uncles built for all of us at Potter’s Point.
And to Madeline Norma, who narrates her world with pre-verbal, polysyllabic infant grunts now but will one day story Caddo Lake with new technologies I could not even conceive of in the year of her birth and the year of this project.
Acknowledgments
I am compelled and honored to acknowledge the folks who became immersed in this process with me. Many thanks...
To Dr. Sarah Sloane, whom I am most fortunate to have as an advisor. Sarah’s guidance of this project was as much intellectually rigorous as it was imaginative and inspiring; I can reflect honestly over this whole process and say I enjoyed every moment. Many thanks for her persistent encouragement for me to ditch what bored me, to collect everything, and to trust my gut.
To the other members of my committee who have gone above and beyond what I could ask for in the guidance of a two-credit MA project. To Dr. Tim Amidon, whose input always struck the seemingly impossible balance between grounding my ideas and expanding my imagination. To Dr. Pete Seel, whose forward-thinking enthusiasm about new mediums is contagious. I am grateful for Pete’s Human-Computer Interaction and Communication seminar that first introduced me to the possibilities of AR as a storytelling medium and for Tim’s Histories of Writing class that, in a semester that went by too quickly, challenged everything I knew about our narratives of writing.
To the whole faculty and staff of the Colorado State University Rhetoric and Composition program. For every encouraging word in the hallway in Eddy on a rough day, for every excellent question that left me thinking for hours, for every class, colloquium, and office conversation, I am transformed, edified, and grateful.
To my cohort, whose diverse perspectives and interests made the last two years more enlightening than I ever thought returning to school could be. Especially to Cara Ramsay, my fearless officemate who kept me and the plants alive and well; and to Emily Lapadura, who took every panicked phone call and text from three time zones away.
To my partner, Jared, whose Pythonic zen encompasses much more than the command line and makes our whole life beautiful not ugly, simple not complex.