Composing Collaborative Feminist Recovery Projects with Scalar

Parts: Both Form and Content

Scalar is a robust and flexible technology with a mind-boggling array of design and content options that allow users to "assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways" (Scalar 2 User Guide, n.d.). Noted for its rich multimodality and intertextuality—that "anything can annotate anything else" (Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, quoted in Reed, 2018, p. 27)—Scalar's content management system does not distinguish between images, video, pages, or posts. Instead, it encourages not only the use of multiple media but also the repeated cross-referencing and intertextual linking of media within a project.

The effect is an emphasis on the content itself, with an openness to varied interpretive approaches. As Ashley Reed (2018) found in her own work using Scalar to create a digital edition of a 20th-century scrapbook, the interface design "allows for a flexible and segmented editing process as Scalar’s designers intended: instead of deciding what the site will look like to users and then building pages accordingly, authors can concentrate on gathering images and video, annotating them, and writing explanatory or analytical text, and then decide how to assemble these various pieces of content in an order that makes sense to both editors and potential users" (p. 27). 

In this way, the different content types offered by Scalar combine and connect with one another to effect the broader rhetorical gesture of feminist recovery that questions traditional modes of organization. They amplify the visual and organizational ability of design and represent a unique way to learn through a multimodal presentation. Pages, media, images, text, videos, media links, and visualizations structure the relationships to other content both within the book and outside external sources. Through its diverse content types and organizational options, Scalar's interface can contribute to the reconfiguration of the rhetorical tradition and set a "digital foundation" for future women's writing recovery work (Almjeld et al., 2016).   

One key consideration in regards to content types in Scalar is that a feminist scholar can both foreground a text's unique materiality and its interconnectivity to other texts and ideas by using the various content types in concert with one another. For example, while more traditional anthologies and database projects often index or mention the historical timeline and geographical location of a writer, Scalar's content types allow the anthologizer to foreground these ways of knowing, embedding an interactive timeline or map directly onto the page. Just as Jenn Almjeld et al. (2016) incorporated "both text and video in an attempt to increase its overall reach and accessibility," Scalar provides scholars with the option to integrate text, videos, images, external databases, and annotations to encourage an inclusive and collaborative history of rhetoric. The content types provide visual recognition of women writers and previous recovery work, foregrounding the scaffolded and interrelational aspects of feminist scholarship and practice.

We did not use Scalar itself to house the content of our archive (refer to Selections) because of Scalar's small file size limit (2 MB). We found it easier to embed and link the media from an external source, such as YouTube, Vimeo, Omeka, SoundCloud, Critical Commons, Internet Archive, Shoah Foundation, other archives, or on local servers. In our experience, Scalar was less helpful with the digitization process of adding sources that were not already available online, as needed of many feminist historiography projects.

At the same time, the practice of embedding content from other databases can work to further advance the goal of social circulation, as it links feminist content and analyses to one another across digital space. This feature makes Scalar more nimble as an interface and provides exciting opportunities for richly connecting archival and interpretive work with many under-studied materials. We understand Scalar as an interpretive layer on top of other archives and databases rather than a platform for the archive itself. 

Types of Content

Scalar offers several different ways to present online content, which combine for nonhierarchical and flexible models of representation. These "parts" of a Scalar book include a wide range of content types represented through a range of presentational and organizational features, and different file formats further enable different kinds of interaction and annotation.

The two basic content options in Scalar, Pages and Media, are closely related and sometimes interchangeable:

Pages

Pages are simple text editing spaces. The content of a page is never in isolation but rather in relationship with a Path, Comment, Annotation, or Tags can be a direct or indirect object. A page might be a path containing other elements, or might be contained by a path; it might be a comment or be commented on; it might be an annotation or be annotated; it might be a tag, or might be tagged. The networked method of organization inherent to this content type enables feminist researchers to depart from rigid categories and structures towards dynamic interconnectivity. The multi-directional framework in the very creation of pages makes visible the nonlinear connections within the work.

Overall, pages lay the framework for contextualizing content, exploring the database, and connecting to other repositories of feminist knowledge.  

Media 

Media, the second primary content type, is generally something that is analyzed or otherwise showcased in the text. Media might be an image, a video, a webpage, or most importantly, an artifact in PDF format. While media are often embedded on a page, each Media item is also a Page of its own and can be made a path, comment, annotation, or tag of any other page. Similarly, it can be part of another path, commented on, annotated, or tagged by any other page. Conversely, a Page in Scalar can also be treated as a Media item and embedded using the above methods. This interconnectedness of the media type embodies freeform design practices that enable the anthologizer to reconfigure traditional database layouts. In resisting hierarchical, linear presentation modes, they provide feminist alternatives to the way we currently curate texts in many anthologies and digital database projects. 

Visualizations

A third type of content that is a major feature of Scalar is the visualizations that showcase the connections between excerpts, sections, and keywords within a Scalar project. Visualizations in Scalar are computational tools that "text mine" the book to dynamically engineer conceptual and/or technical interpretations of the text. In "Digital Pedagogy Unplugged," Paul Fyfe (2011) advocated for creating patterns in the text that allow "reading from the middle … alternat[ing] close and distant perspectives to generate its critical current." Between close reading and distant reading, Scalar visualizations reveal these algorithms within the text, allowing users to think creatively in interpretation, and make useful links between the materiality and digital texts. Accessing the book’s content via metadata allows the reader to see these different relationships.

For example, a tag visualization creates a glossary of key terms that challenge their standard definitions by connecting themes and content in a project in a web-like structure. This visualization builds on the traditional use of a glossary by creating opportunities to create patterns, visualize different perspectives, and tease out differences between texts.  

Again, reviewing these visualizations reveals potentially unintended relationships and patterns in one's own work, shaping design and content decisions in an iterative fashion. As Tarez Graban, Alexis E. Ramsey-Tobienne, and Whitney Myers (2015) argued of metadata projects more broadly, these tools entail alternative approaches to what "content" is. Moving from assumptions of containment and stability, they allow scholars to "imagine new kinds of relations among texts and users rather than only representing relations according to traditional taxonomies of storage and use" (p. 239). These new "relations" (a key term on the backend of Scalar’s interface) necessitate alternative design decisions in turn.

Display of Content

Different types of content can be displayed in different ways within Scalar pages, creating dynamic interconnection between parts of the book. The functions listed below are each ways of embedding content onto a Page. These content options empower feminist researchers to experiment with different ways of organizing and connecting selections, cited sources, databases, and images.

For example, below you can see how we used the timeline widget in our project to show a linear temporal organization of both the anthologized writers' work and our work as student-authors. This visualization links directly to our original Scalar project.

As inexperienced technologists, we found these embedded functions overwhelming to navigate and sift through at first but ultimately found them inviting as we played around with ways of incorporating digital tools into our archival workflow. Moreover, because we could choose to embed any page as a Media Link, and any Media as a Note, we tried to smooth the jump between chapters and selections as we made connections between different student authors’ experiences and writing. 

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