Ten years ago, Jessica Enoch and Jean Bessette (2013) recognized a disconnect between the methodologies and conversations happening under the banner of feminist historiography and those in digital humanities. Despite this disconnect, the authors highlighted the resonances between feminist historiographers and digital humanists by tracing digital historiography’s ability to support Gesa Kirsch and Jacqueline Jones Royster’s (2010) three feminist rhetorical practices of strategic contemplation, social circulation, and critical imagination. In doing so, they join media scholar Tara McPherson (2009) — herself a project lead for Scalar — in her call for humanists to experiment with digital projects in their research and embrace the role of the "multimodal scholar" to enrich their research practices and products. McPherson (2009) argues that 

hands-on engagement with digital forms reorients the scholarly imagination, not because the tools are cool or new (even if they are) or because the audience for our work might be expanded (even if it is), but because scholars come to realize that they understand their arguments and their objects of study differently, even better, when they approach them through multiple modalities and emergent and interconnected forms of literacy. The ability to deploy new experiential, emotional, and even tactile aspects of argument and expression can open up fresh avenues of inquiry and research. (p. 121) 

As Enoch and Bessette (2013) emphasize, this interest in new experiential, emotional, and embodied possibilities resonates strongly with a feminist ethos, inviting further connections to feminist historiography. Still, despite these resonances, Enoch and Bessette (2013) rightly recognized that few feminist historiographers were affording themselves of the opportunities to employ digital methodologies in their work. 

However, things have changed since then. While Enoch and Bessette had to work to make the case ten years ago, the intersections between digital media and historical/archival projects with explicitly liberatory and feminist aims is now unsurprising. Multiple well-known digital archiving projects now exist with specifically feminist and other liberatory aims, from the Linked Women Pedagogues Project (Graban, LWP) to the Digital Transgender Archive to the Colored Conventions Project (Foreman, CCP) and others. Digital historiography is now a well-recognized practice among feminist historiographers with smaller-scale projects as well, with the use of digital platforms like Omeka in scholarly and pedagogical contexts now making such projects more available to those without the coding knowledge or resources needed to develop large-scale databases and exhibits of their own (see Florida State University Postcard Archive and Museum of Everyday Writing for good examples; also see Enoch and VanHaitsma, 2015). Often occurring in the context of rhetoric and writing courses, where students benefit from the critical rhetorical literacies developed through both analysis and production of digital projects (Enoch and VanHaitsma, 2015; VanHaitsma, 2019), such feminist digital historiography projects engage archiving, curation, and transcription as feminist recovery practices that fulfill the promises of digital feminist historiography anticipated by Enoch and Bessette (2013). 

Particularly with the participation of Black and woman technologists designing interfaces with an eye towards disrupting heteropatriarchal Eurocentric norms and practices, the online platforms that enable these projects increasingly support approaches to archives and archival storytelling that challenge systems of power and domination inherent to traditional archives and histories. The ability for communities to construct their own archives is one major affordance. Smaller, more localized digital archives work in conjunction with larger database projects to circulate what have been rare women’s texts and perspectives among increasingly broad public audiences. These interventions hold particular advantages for women of color, advancing what art historian Sarah Lewis (2016) calls “representational justice” by increasing the visibility of Black bodies and practices in public digital space. This is about more than just enabling more accessible and inclusive collections and rhetorical histories; it is about fundamentally disrupting and laying bare the politics of exclusion that circumscribed rhetorical canons and categories of humanity in the first place. 

These projects are about the process and products of what Kim Gallon (2016) has termed the “technology of recovery” — restoring black humanity through digital tools. As Gallon (2016) argues, “Recovery rests at the heart of Black studies, as a scholarly tradition that seeks to restore the humanity of Black people lost and stolen through systemic global racialization” (p. 45). In a similar way, recovery has been a foundation for feminist rhetoricians, who seek not merely inclusion in but fundamental disruption of the power structures that produced rhetorical canons as primarily male and Eurocentric in the first place (Biesecker, 1992). Attention to how technologies of archival research, recovery, and representation contribute to this work are increasingly crucial (see Rawson, 2010; Graban, 2013; Fancher, Kirsch, and Williams, 2020). Such feminist digital archiving work builds, implicitly and explicitly, on earlier technofeminist work that recognized digital interfaces as political, representing and reinforcing cultural norms associated with white, Western, patriarchal traditions (Buckley, 1986; Selfe and Selfe, 1994; Wysocki and Jasken, 2004; Wajcman, 2004).

Scalar for Digital Feminist Historiography

A range of digital platforms are available for feminist recovery projects, and some larger-scale projects are even supported by custom interfaces that foreground their own values and ideologies. In this webtext we examine the use of Scalar as an open-access, user-friendly platform designed by academics that supports feminist research and recovery projects. 

Scalar is a "free, open source publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online" (Scalar User Guide). It has so far been popular among Digital Humanities (DH) scholars of history, literature, and book history, and lends itself particularly well to the production of digital editions of texts (see Reed, 2018; Sayers and Dietrich, 2013; Kuhn, 2013). One of its main affordances, like other platforms, has been making these digital projects more accessible to scholars without deep technical knowledge and experience. Its interface is not always intuitive, but it does not require coding knowledge to build on it, making it ideal for technologically reluctant feminist historiographers. 

At the same time, Scalar is distinctive in that its non-linear, highly networked design can lead to different scholarly questions and arguments–and different interventions for feminist recovery – than previous platforms allowed. Unlike other common platforms like Omeka and WordPress, Scalar has a much more dynamic, non-linear structure that allows for different kinds of arguments and experiences. As Tara McPherson (2009), one of the project leads, explains: 

Much as with templates for blogs, Scalar templates direct the layout and style of a set of pages, but these templates are much more flexible than the typical blog platforms. They support multiple views on the project’s data—including media-centric views, text-centric views, graph views, grid views, etc.—that can be changed by both the author and reader as well as remix and collaboration capacities and the production of nonlinear content. (p. #)

The resulting Scalar books are akin to other digital archival exhibits in WordPress or Omeka, which curate and interpret archival materials, but with more dynamic interpretive potential. As McPherson (2009) argues, 

This genre of digital scholarship complements the equally important urge to digitize, search, and catalog the human record undertaken by large-scale digitization and archival efforts. While its impulse is to move beyond the encyclopedic toward new interpretive possibilities, it also represents a rich area for new collaborative and infrastructural possibilities for scholarly communication (p. #). 

With its emphasis on new interpretive approaches to an expanded human record, grounded in new collaborative and communicative possibilities, this is an area in which feminist rhetoricians are likely to be keenly interested. 

The visualization below shows a distribution of various types of content in this webtext, including Paths, Pages, Media files, and Tags, with Pages being the most used type of content.

Feminist Values 

This interface answers calls from feminist media theorists for speculative forms of software to help us imagine alternative ways of relating to digital platforms and media technologies. Though Scalar is not an explicitly “feminist” platform, we follow Jen Almjeld et. al (2016) in their project tracing implicit feminist values in digital rhetoric work. Examining a corpus of Kairos articles to develop their definition, Almjeld et al. (2016) argue that feminist rhetorics are:

embodied in that they acknowledge the real person behind the scholar by honoring the personal and the political. This embodiment gives voice to participants and validates their experiences. It is also situated by recognizing positionality and potential bias of the reader. These rhetorics are more accessible to various ways of learning through a nontraditional multimodal presentation. Perhaps above all, feminist rhetorics challenge systems of power and norms set up through hegemonic principles by empowering all ways of being.

We use this definition and the key terms it highlights to examine Scalar as a platform for feminist historiography, in relation to each of these characteristics of feminist rhetorics and other key feminist rhetorical practices (i.e. Kirsch and Royster, 2010). With this framework at hand, we argue that Scalar is an ideal platform for feminist historiographic work, and provide an example of Scalar's use in our own feminist archival work. 

Digital Archiving as Feminist Praxis 

One feature that lends itself to technofeminist work is the fact that Scalar's platform has been fundamentally linked to archives and archival research from its inception, specifically aiming "to close the gap between carefully created digital visual archives and scholarly publication by enabling scholars to work more organically with archival materials, creating interpretive pathways through the materials and enabling new forms of analysis" (McPherson, 2009). Scalar is designed accordingly as a lightweight abstraction layer and authoring platform to showcase digital archival materials that are housed elsewhere, whether that is an institutional repository or YouTube. The work of Scalar is to showcase and interpret those materials for users in a more visual, interconnected way than traditional print scholarship allows. As McPherson (2009) explains, "we might imagine the scholar’s role as providing an 'analytical slice'—a kind of guided tour—of a selection from an archive that allows a more seamless integration of research materials and scholarly analysis" (p. #). 

The archival focus of this platform has a particularly feminist inflection insofar as it supports the social circulation of a more representative, diverse cultural record that includes more women and other marginalized communities. It is no coincidence that many feminist rhetoricians also find themselves to be archival researchers, as so much of the work of feminist rhetoric scholarship still requires excavating hidden or overlooked feminist practices. Platforms that make this work easier and more accessible to variously positioned writers and readers are potential feminist platforms. 

What Scalar does not do is serve as an archive or database itself, as most if not all of the materials in a Scalar book will be housed elsewhere. File size limitations and a range of robust supports for embedded and linked content from across the web keep the platform nimble, and for many projects these features are an affordance. For those interested in digitizing materials that are not available elsewhere on the web, this may prove challenging, as we discuss in our own archiving project. Working on representational justice projects, Black Digital Humanities, and other work involving BIPOC and under-represented communities will particularly require thinking through these questions of where to house the archival materials (see Lewis, 2016; Gallon, 2016), not just how to curate or interpret them. Still, we explore this platform's use for showcasing digital archives and archive-based exhibits in rhetoric as a particular affordance for feminist projects, examining the ways it (dis)allows feminist goals related to recovery, non-linear and non-hierarchical design, interconnectivity, and collaboration, among others.

Below you can see how we approached embedding archival materials in our our own archiving project, housing them on our own institution's servers and then using the metadata, annotations, and captions available on Scalar.

In what follows, we elaborate on and evidence the feminist values of this platform in terms of specific functionality associated with the Parts (content and organization), Paths (navigation), and People (networks and collaboration) in our own feminist recovery project. First, we begin by introducing that feminist recovery project in a bit more detail. 

Follow the path below to continue to the Project section, where we introduce the digital an(ti)thology project we created as an example of what a Scalar project looks like and can do for feminist recovery projects, or go directly to the Parts section to learn more about Scalar's interface, specifically in relation to the kinds of media and content it can feature.