To find a specific page, look under the page heading; likewise for media, or tags.

You can also create a set of visualizations of the project, using the View menu. It'll show you that there's more media than text in this project, so you might watch it as much as read it.

Each path has a navigation "header" at the top  of each page. You can click to follow the path or the header will
indicate where you have intersected with other paths and you might want to take a turn-off.

There is no "right" or "wrong" way to interact with the book. But here are some thoughts:

Here I'll offer some general thoughts about reading in Scalar: below I offer some practical guidance. Scalar's primary affordance--to use the pet word of digital discourse--is that it allows for non-linear reading. For those of us who grew up with the codex form of the book, that can be unnatural, even disturbing. That sense that we don't quite know what to do next shows how deeply ingrained the practices of the codex have become. That is to say, we take it for granted that a book starts at the "front." It continues in a linear direction, page by page, until the "end" is reached at the back. We happily notice a variety of apparatuses that do not conform to this pattern, ranging from notes to appendices, dedications, acknowledgements, illustrations, charts, Roman and Arabic page numbers and so on. Critical scholarship in the 1960s and 70s demonstrated effectively that these conventions were not simply contrivances to assist the reader but ways of compelling narratives to serve a certain purpose, to limit the polysemy of meaning and to make sure that the reader read in the way that she was supposed to do.

There were a variety of experiments to displace this hegemony, such as Jacques Derrida's experimental project Glas. But it was above all with the development of hypertext, enabled by the quintessential HTML command, the hyperlink, that this movement really became extensive. The hypertext novel or story offered readers and writers new means of interaction and interactivity. Such efforts led to declarations that the Internet was likely to see a revival of the novel, even the epistolary form, while also supporting claims that it was primarily a text-based medium.

Since 2000, the net has become far more visualized, with the creation of YouTube in 2005 and the widespread popularity of photographs on social networking sites completely changing its feel. There are literally billions of photographs online, with over 5 billion on Flickr alone, while YouTube expands exponentially. Whereas the argument of this project is that visuality is not simply "visual," if there is such a thing, it must be accepted that the present form of online communication is deeply interfaced with visualized media.

The strength of Scalar, then, is that it forms a hybrid between these two modalities of online critical practice. It's a hyperlinked, non-linear reading platform that at the same time allows for a full integration with still and moving images of all kinds. A reader can progress by looking, or by reading, or by oscillating back and forth. The author both anticipates and enables this promiscuity without being able to control it. In the end, the disciplinary form--in all senses--of the monograph finds itself yielding to a form that has no real name: Intergraph? multigraph? videograph? The videograph (say) depends on a relation of trust: the author must trust the reader to find both what was intended and what was not but is nonetheless there. The reader trusts the openings that the form presents, without overly indulging in a hermeneutics of suspicion about what was elided or erased.

In short, this form is what would really be meant by open-source: not just the availability of the source-code (although that should be there) and not only its being made available free of charge to the user. Open-source would be an interactive commitment to the understanding that each and every form is imperfect but that each iteration allows author and reader alike to imagine means of improving both the code and what is created with it. An author comes to understand that books are never finished, merely abandoned to the publisher. With the videograph, that moment can be still further deferred--in theory--permanently or at least for as long as readers and authors want to engage with it.