Scalar facilitates a kind of re-orientation that encourages alternative modes of scholarship. For instance, in its design it allows users to categorize writing into different genres—annotation, commentary, paths, etc.—thereby challenging the textual bias of literary scholarship by allowing authors to privilege other mediums (and even other forms of writing) within the inherited hierarchy. The workflow assignment was particularly interesting in this regard. In being asked to describe and then exhibit our workflow, the differences between writing and building were frequently collapsed, revealing that—as Ramsay and Rockwell suggest—writing, too, is a method. The process of documenting our workflows demonstrated how writing is only one among many facets of scholarly work, while exhibiting these workflows—for many of us via screencast—reminded us that building a digital object was as much a part of our scholarly work as writing. Using Scalar as a platform for composition thus facilitated reflexive thinking about how this becomes that.

An example of how Scalar worked to challenge this bias is Emily's response to the workflow assignment. When she first completed this assignment, she posted it on Scalar as a description of her workflow, organized through a long list of bullet points beneath the accompanying video. When she went back to edit the piece for this book (at this point having a much more sophisticated understanding of Scalar), she used the same description of her workflow. But this time she distributed the description across annotations of the video. By making the video the primary page for her response to the prompt, and then writing annotations to this page, the video became the primary object of inquiry, with writing facilitating an understanding of it. While it is true that given our increasing familiarity with new media, we are becoming more and more accustomed to reading visual representations that supplement writing, we (in the humanities at least) are still hardly accustomed to reading these visuals as their own objects of inquiry, making their own kinds of arguments.   

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