My primary goal for this webtext was to clarify our understanding of influence specifically in the context of DMAC and generally in the context of technology-driven professional development in the humanities at large. I sought to turn back onto DMAC the very multimodal and digital methodology that DMAC attempts to develop, to treat DMAC as its own object of critique. By foregrounding institutional affiliation and geographical location, I also sought to conceive of influence as irrevocably institutionalized even if participants locate their work on the margins of their home institutional and professional cultures. Without downplaying the very real work that it will take to put multimodal and digital composition on equal footing with other discourses and disciplines, visualizing DMAC's influence across space and time with reference to institutional entities allows us the following conclusions.

I. Individual aspiration becomes institutional action.

While many participants attend DMAC to bolster individual literacies and aptitudes (the most commonly reported motivation in the survey responses), the Institute embraces an ethos much more tied to paying it forward, so to speak. Reported effects of DMAC attendance corroborate this shift in perspective; becoming an advocate or mentor at one's home institution, for example, emerges as the most commonly reported result of DMAC attendance at an almost five-fold increase from reported expectations. Generally, reported effects of attendance focused much more on action in an institutional context: revising curricula or degree requirements, gaining administrative positions, hosting workshops, increasing departmental or institutional visibility, etc. DMAC, then, works less as a lesson to be learned, and more as a call to responsibility and action. The emphasis shifts from what one does for and during DMAC to what one does with and after DMAC.

II. Professional development succeeds when it seeds itself elsewhere.

That we can describe the majority of DMAC attendance from an institutional standpoint as one and done (that is, that most institutions send only one participant or send participants to only one year's Institute) doesn't necessarily indicate DMAC's failure. The goal of a professional development institute ought not to be the consolidation of a network of long-term dependence, but rather, and perhaps counterintuitively, it should be the gradual elimination of the need for its existence as such, the latter of which is to say that DMAC ought not to quit at some point, but that DMAC, if successful, should find itself addressing new exigencies on the gradual (glacial?) timeline of institutional change. Participants return to their home institutions as seeds for DMAC's messages and methodologies to grow in new soil, ensured by the institutional action in which many participants engage after DMAC. On the other hand, long-term relationships do not necessarily indicate a shortcoming. Many DMAC participants (especially graduate students, non-tenure-track faculty, and junior faculty) are not anchored to their home institutions for the rest of their careers, and, like DMAC's approach to staffing, institutions and departments must periodically invigorate themselves with new energy as people come and go. Trends over time indicate an ideal equilibrium (approximately 50/50) between legacy institutions, which provide DMAC with long-term stability, and one-time institutions, which ensure fresh perspectives every year.

III. Professional development is professional destabilization.

Respondents consistently remarked on the professional diversity of DMAC cohorts in terms of career stages (graduate student, NTT and TT faculty, junior and senior faculty, administrator), institutional contexts (student population, academic focus, departmental culture, geogaphical location), individual projects (resources, curricular design, pedagogy, scholarly composition, curation), and individual literacies (research areas, teaching experience, technological expertise). However, diversity accomplishes little if an institute reifies traditional institutional hierarchies. As one interview subject commented, DMAC possesses a democratic quality by which participants' experiences, insights, and goals are valued equally. For Scott DeWitt, DMAC is this incredible leveling of the playing field, and it’s just an opportunity for all of us to remember what it means to learn something completely new (Denecker and Tulley, 2014).

[T]he leveling effect of technology is substantial, Cindy Selfe points out, no matter whether they’re very experienced scholars or junior scholars or graduate students (Denecker and Tulley, 2014). Thus, we should qualify what we actually mean when we talk about valuing other people's perspectives. In the same way that institutional hierarchies enervate a cohort's professional diversity, valuing that diversity as a token gesture also undermines an institute's efficacy. Rather, participants must need each other—and recognize that they need each other—in a very real sense. Counterintuitively, then, professional development seems to work best when structured around a destabilizing element (in DMAC's case, digital media and technology), something that disrupts not only the typical, day-to-day ways that we interact with each other, but also our understanding of professionalism and professional hierarchies in the first place. Professional development, then, ought to promote active reflection on what, exactly, professional means, what it ought to mean, and how we might best develop it.

IV. Professional development remains a professional luxury.

While DMAC seeks to destabilize professional hierarchies, the individual and institutional resources that attendance requires place DMAC beyond the reach of many teachers and scholars. The most underrepresented group among DMAC survey respondents, for example, is by far the largest academic employment category in higher education: non-tenure-track, auxiliary, adjunct, or contingent faculty. Most DMAC participants attend because they're able to secure funding from their home institutions, which, by and large, don't invest much in the professional development of faculty off the tenure track. Word of mouth, too, tends to privilege those who are the most plugged into discourse networks: to wit, graduate students and tenure-track faculty at research universities. Any one person or institute can't be expected to solve the systemic problems in higher education administration, but DMAC and institutes with similar approaches provide a unique opportunity for us to make the case—and to reflect critically on how, to whom, and for whom we make the case—for a more equitable distribution of professional support.

This webtext sought to examimne DMAC from as high an altitude as possible. What would DMAC look like if individual accounts of its influence dissolved into a larger gestalt? Like looking at fields first from the ground and then from above, the sight isn't entirely unexpected, but with the latter perspective we see much more: the hidden glens, the subtle paths worn in the land over years of routine. Lest we lose sight of what matters, we ought to keep in mind the mantra with which DMAC begins every year: people first, curriculum second, technology third.