How to Read this Dissertation
Although I make every effort to follow the American Psychological Association (APA) formatting guidelines, there are some evident discrepancies that I will explain here, rather than be called out for non-compliance in a scholarly work. Many of these variations on APA are made as a result of this digital delivery, constraints imposed by the affordances of the tools being used, and in consideration of the readability of the overall document.
First, due to limitations within the text editor in Scalar, some non-conforming errors are evident. Since extended skills and fluencies in HTML or CSS coding would be required to correct these omissions, I accepted this limitation, as I hope you also will, as I have deferred to the affordances provided. Therefore, double spacing of text is not done in this Scalar document. Also, there is a space inserted between each paragraph, which allows the eye to wander down the page and may assist in locating a specific section or paragraph. This may allow for reference citations to designate the specific page and paragraph, since each page has a distinct uniform resource locator (URL) and paragraphs can be counted down the page. This may assist others in citations, should this digital document become a source for future academic writing. The APA formatting in the reference section is also non-compliant as a result of the text-editor limitations.
Second, the affordances of Scalar to insert notes and media within text and pages has increased the interactivity of this document, allowing for 'just-in-time' locating of glossary items as you are reading. In the PDF version of this dissertation, the glossary items and descriptions are located at the end of the document rather than being embedded within the pages of the manuscript. Although the software affords a fully interactive and media rich document production, I have constrained and restrained this document to only contain notes, media, and links to external internet locations to those that support the academic and scholarly nature and topic of this manuscript.
Please note that in order to comply with university requirements for a PhD dissertation, I have also created a portable document format (PDF) version of this dissertation that strictly adheres to APA formatting. Any errors in either document are not intentional and are acknowledged as human mistakes. The provenance of each page and object in this document is available by contacting the author.