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Scalar Up Close: Visualizations

Scalar | Index Visualization

Scalar gives authors the tools to create essay- and book-length works in ways that take advantage of the unique capabilities of digital writing, including nested, recursive, and non-linear structures. For this reason, the platform includes built-in visualizations to help both authors and readers navigate those structures.

Scalar’s visualizations enable one to see the contents of a book rendered in multiple ways. Each visualization can be made the default view for a page, making it possible to integrate visualizations directly into your book. For authors working with book-level structures that may not be immediately apparent at the page level, a visualization is a good way to help readers conceptualize the “shape” of their content.

For example, the index visualization shown above displays all content in the book in a grid format where each square represents one piece of content. Content is color-coded by type. Most importantly, links between content are displayed on roll-over. Rolling over the square for a path will reveal all the contents of that path; rolling over the square for a tag will show all the items it tags. What’s more clicking a content element selects it, keeping its relationships visible even when rolling over other content, allowing multiple sets of relationships to be viewed simultaneously. As with all visualizations in Scalar, double-clicking a title opens the associated content.

Thus, visualizations act not just as way for authors and readers to identify and understand the macro- and micro-structures of a book, but as a way to navigate those structures. The tag visualization (shown to the right) can be an effective tool in this regard. In general, structure, in Scalar becomes especially powerful when it’s used not just as a way to organize content, but as a way to model theoretical relationships. For example, let’s say you’re writing about three characters in a movie and the types of shots the director uses to frame them. While in a traditional book you would typically expound on those relationships in prose, in Scalar you could create a page for each character, a page for each shot type, and then tag the characters with the shot types. In Scalar, those connections become navigable pathways within your book and the tag visualization itself acts as an auto-generated interactive diagram of the relationships between the characters and shot types.

For more, see the section on Visualizations in our User’s Guide.

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