The process of uploading and adding metadata to many different media types in Scalar, including personal photographs, videos stored on YouTube or Vimeo, manuscript facsimiles from the British Library and other online repositories, and audio files, gave our class unique insight into the hidden, almost elusive materiality of digital objects. As Kirschenbaum argues in the introduction to Mechanisms, digital environments are essentially "abstract projection[s]" that "propagate the illusion…of immaterial behavior: identification without ambiguity, transmission without loss, repetition without originality" (11). While digital objects in their front-facing forms appear to be immaterial, infinitely replicable, and shareable, they are in fact made possible by material objects such as servers (often in different databases across the continent [4]) and hard drives. Scalar’s distinctive interface stores media files in separately-accessible locations that allow users to view each object’s metadata apart from that object’s rhetorical context in a webpage; in Scalar, digital objects are more than just front-facing projections of the material world. They are accorded their own URIs and their own publicly-accessible repository.

Thinking of Scalar itself as a space where we not only discuss and experiment with the tension between digital and analog objects, but also as its own evocative object which makes possible the enduring ephemeral Chun describes, reveals its force as a pedagogical tool. Despite but also because of ourselves, we could see the problems Chun describes manifesting themselves within the space of our Scalar book.

---

Comment on this page