Online, open-access, and peer-reviewed journal Digital Studies/Le champ numérique has published a detailed article by ANVC Info Design Director, Craig Dietrich, and NEH-Vectors Summer Institute alum, Jentery Sayers (Assistant Professor, English; Director, Maker Lab in the Humanities; University of Victoria), on scholarly communication and digital asset management. The article, “After the Document Model for Scholarly Communication: Some Considerations for Authoring with Rich Media”, includes a case study approach to ThoughtMesh, a Vectors Journal-produced project launched in 2005 that incorporates a tag-based system for linking academic writing across the internet. ThoughtMesh was created with Dietrich and others on the team, and the linked-data concepts from that project carry over to Scalar, which is built upon a semantic web architecture that Sayers and Dietrich address extensively in their article. For instance, in “After the Document Model,” they write the following about the Resource Description Framework (RDF):

As a technology, RDF is applicable to scholarly communications for both practical and philosophical reasons. In the case of Scalar, it helps the platform facilitate traces, citations, and views that have already been developed by the semantic web community. Practically, it offers a flexible way to model data from multiple sources and to contextualise material based on ontologies. Philosophically, it provides a solution distinct from the relational systems prevalent on the web today, and it is a device for expressing information derived from a variety of locations or structures.

Scalar’s flexible architecture facilitates a responsible use of media assets from partner archives. Gone is the need for authors to spend time writing detailed citations of media assets like images, audio, video, and code snippets. Rather, Scalar will automatically create citations (subject, of course, to revision or editing) for each imported asset. This way, proper sharing practices are embedded in the authoring process. In “After the Document Model,” Sayers and Dietrich continue:

[A]uthors are not creating small, isolated archives on the Scalar server. Although they can upload their own videos, audio, and images to that space, they are instead encouraged to house them with a partner archive. Or, in the case where assets are already online, they are encouraged to embed those assets in their Scalar projects. That way, systems point to existing URIs rather than duplicating resources and producing redundancies. Here, the advantage is that media playback is overseen by groups that not only have institutional support but also specialise in metadata, asset categorisation, provenance, and interoperability.

Read the full article at http://www.digitalstudies.org/ojs/index.php/digital_studies/article/view/234/301.

To follow up on our recent Beta release, the Scalar development team will be offering a series of free online webinars this Fall.

Our “Introduction to Scalar” webinars will cover basic features of the platform: a review of existing Scalar books and a hands-on introduction to paths, tags, annotations and importing media. Our “Intermediate Scalar” webinars will delve into more advanced topics including the effective use of visualizations, annotating with media and a primer on customizing appearances in Scalar. Finally, one advanced webinar will cover Scalar’s RDF-based API as well as Scalar’s theme engine for programmers who wish to utilize the platform’s internal components when creating interfaces.

Our Fall schedule will include five dates:

Introduction to Scalar  – September 26, 10am-12pm (PST)
Intermediate Scalar – October  17,  10am-12pm (PST)
Introduction to Scalar – November 14, 4pm-6pm  (PST)
Advanced Scalar/API – November 21, 10am-12pm (PST)
Intermediate Scalar – December 12, 4pm-6pm  (PST)

Spaces are limited, so sign up now at our registration page!

We are pleased to announce the launch of Freedom’s Ring, a Scalar-based, interactive experience of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Produced by the King Institute at Stanford for the 50th anniversary of King’s Speech, Freedom’s Ring allows viewers to compare the written and spoken speech, explore multimedia images, listen to movement activists, and uncover historical context.

Freedom’s Ring is a custom-designed website which pulls its content from Scalar via the open API, enabling the interface to be tailored to the content at hand. The project contains an interactive transcript that highlights differences between the way King’s speech was delivered and how it was originally written. To capture these differences, Scalar was used to annotate every phrase of the speech, following King’s own cadences. Each annotation contains both the spoken and written versions of the phrase (if they differ), plus markup that distinguishes the two for display. Key words in the transcript are linked to questions illuminating the context of the speech, and each question is a Scalar path containing short explications of related topics, with extensive use of video and images to shed additional light on the subject matter.

Celebrating its fifteenth anniversary as a born-digital journal this fall, caa.reviews continues its exploration of the scholarly review medium through “Exhibitions Close Up—Bernini: Sculpting in Clay.” This multimedia, open-access project was made possible through a collaboration between CAA and the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture.

Exhibitions Close Up—Bernini: Sculpting in Clay allows users to experience the recent exhibition, Bernini: Sculpting in Clay, virtually. The project features a video walkthrough which permits visitors to tour the exhibition as if moving through the galleries; a complete floor plan of the exhibition; comparative illustrations of some of Bernini’s finished works; educational videos on Bernini’s modeling techniques; critical reviews of the exhibition; and an interview with one of the exhibition’s curators.

Our latest webinar is up for viewing. Alexei Taylor covers paths, tags, annotations, visualizations, custom styling and other basic and intermediate features of Scalar. He also discusses more advanced topics such as strategies for structuring your Scalar project given the nature of hyper-reading.

View the webinar here.

View our past webinars here.

We’ve added a new section on custom styling to our Scalar User’s Guide. If you’ve ever wanted to change the font style of the title in your Scalar project, the links in your navigation menu or the background color of the footer on Scalar pages, it’s all covered here. No prior knowledge of CSS is required.