In a 2011 blog post on the term "digital humanities," Sharon Mattern argues that working in a multimodal environment can facilitate critique of "what constitutes knowledge," who creates and disseminates it, and how it is legitimized. As a platform that encourages multimodal scholarship, Scalar (and other digital environments) allows scholars to shift emphasis from the fabled final product, which students and teachers so often associate with print, to process. Millar Usiskin speaks of the challenges of "making in unfamiliar spaces"; I want to interrogate how each of our workflows were impacted by working in an online collaborative (though unfamiliar) environment. In other words, how does an awareness of the workflows of others impact one’s understanding of the relationship between an argument’s "finished-ness" and the knowledge it communicates?

As I worked through the first few prompts--the workflow, metadata, and granulation assignments--I noticed that each week, after I posted my completed task on Scalar, I was disconcerted by a feeling of incompletion, as if I had not truly submitted a final draft. The illusion of being "done" is eroded in Scalar, largely because submitting an assignment online does not involve the act of physically printing text on paper, the final stage of most traditional assignments in the humanities. Publishing my (born-digital) work on Scalar made me feel as if my weekly responses were perpetually in beta, hypothetically available for modification or even improvement weeks after their due dates (and hence, by definition, not "finished"). For example, the video I created with iMovie from screencasts of workflow on my laptop is, in fact, stored on Youtube, not Scalar. I could have easily gone back and made changes, additions, or deletions to the video on YouTube without even going back to iMovie, given Google’s introduction of YouTube’s online video editor in 2010.

Yet disrupting the tendency in the humanities to privilege product over process is one of online publishing’s strengths. In "Introduction: Media Studies and the Digital Humanities," Tara McPherson contrasts the linear organization of the print medium to the database, which "present[s] multiple lines of thought in relation to the materials at hand and to invite others to join us in this process in extended collaboration and convention" (121). Not only does publishing on a "less finished," or fixed, platform have the potential of opening scholarly argument up to new and innovative branches of thought, it also facilitates collaboration, making the writing process of colleagues more transparent, and hence pedagogical in construction as well as argument.

Due to mitigating circumstances, I had to miss my group's final roundtable presentation, which I was supposed to present to the rest of the class with Alyssa Arbuckle and another student. When I returned to the project, I had to create the equivalent of a ten-minute "presentation" in Scalar that worked with the material covered by Arbuckle and our colleague in their in-person presentation, which I more or less recreated from their rough notes (recorded in GoogleDocs) and the PowerPoint slides and summaries they had posted to Scalar. I had to rethink through the stages of their workflow and then duplicate it myself, mentally and physically embodying the steps they took in the initial planning stages of the presentation. Scalar and GoogleDocs' built-in versioning features made Arbuckle and our colleague’s thought processes transparent and easy to follow; my after-the-fact collaboration became an exercise in thinking through and enacting someone else's workflow.

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