Scalar naturally facilitates a kind of re-orientation which allows us to consider alternative modes of scholarship. Its design encouraging users to chunk writing into different genres--annotation, commentary, tags, etc., challenges the textual bias of literary scholarship by allowing us to privilege other mediums (and even other forms of writing) within the inherited hierarchy.  The workflow assignments were particularly interesting in regard to rethinking writing as akin to building.  In being asked to describe and then exhibit our workflow, the difference between writing, and say, building a map, were collapsed, revealing that writing too--as Ramsay and Rockwell point out--is also a methodology.  And in either the case of writing, or building a Google map,  even when following a specific set of directions, the results are extraordinarily different, as both our workflows and maps demonstrate. Using Scalar as both a platform for composition and building facilitated reflexive thinking about
both.

An example of how Scalar worked to challenge this bias is my own workflow assignment.  When I first completed this assignment I posted it on Scalar as a description of my workflow, organized as a long list of bullet points, with an accompanying video.  When I went back to edit this piece for the book, at this point having a much more sophisticated understanding of Scalar, I used the same description of my workflow, but this time I broke this description up into annotations to accompany the video.  By making the video the main page, and the writing simply annotations to this page, the video became the primary object of inquiry, while the writing simply facilitated its understanding.  While it is true that given our increasing familiarity with new media, we are becoming more and more accustomed to reading visual representations which supplement writing, we (in the humanities at least) are still little-accustomed to ‘reading’ these visuals as their own objects of inquiry which make their own kinds of arguments. 

When I first completed this assignment, my own assumptions about what constitutes an assignment for an English grad seminar dictated how I used Scalar.  As we continued to use Scalar throughout the semester, the way Scalar is structured to allow for different modes of scholarship, inquiry, and demonstration eventually began to inform how I thought about how to best perform and display my work.  While indeed sometimes writing should remain the primary emphasis in a given assignment or work of scholarship, in the case of this workflow assignment, showing rather than describing seemed much more appropriate.  As a platform, Scalar provided a unique means of implementing a more appropriate mode of displaying and performing the workflow assignment.   To return to the larger issue at hand--building as writing, and as I have argued, writing as building--I think that a quick run through our various assignments--especially a chronological one--will demonstrate how, as a platform, Scalar helped to collapse these distinctions--revealing the ways in which building can, in some cases, not just stand in for writing, but do something entirely different, while simultaneously revealing the more methodological ways in which we can approach writing, through building

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Authors: Alyssa McLeod, Jana Millar Usiskin, and Emily Smith
Word Count: 506

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