Composing Collaborative Feminist Recovery Projects with Scalar

Introduction: Digital Feminist Historiography

At the intersection of the “archival turn” of rhetoric and composition and the necessary attention to the role of digital new media in all of our work, scholars in the field of rhetoric and composition (and in adjacent fields of public history, communication, and the like) have had a strong interest in the analysis and production of digital archiving and storytelling projects in recent years (see Cohen and Rosenzweig; Enoch and VanHaitsma; Gold and Enoch; VanHaitsma). Media scholar Tara McPherson (a co-founder of Scalar) has called all humanists to experiment with such digital projects in their own research, embracing the role of the "multimodal scholar" to enrich their research practices and products. As she argues, "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" (121). 

Digital Feminist Archives and Historiography

While it has been true, as Enoch and Bessette have argued, that feminist historiographers have been slow to take up this invitation of digital multimodality (635), that is also changing. Whether they are building digital archives and exhibits as a scholarly project of their own, establishing and supporting community-generated archives, or analyzing and building digital archives and exhibits in the classroom, these scholars are committed to exploring the rhetorical aspects of digital archives and online curation platforms and the potential they offer to connect new audiences and publics to rhetorical studies. Of course, digital archives are not without their limitations (see Haskins; Cushman), but it seems to be a general consensus among feminist rhetorical scholars that digital platforms are promising sites of archival research and narration.

One example has been the widespread interest among feminist historiographers in the free, open-source archiving platform Omeka. Developed for archival and museum curation, this user-friendly platform lends itself readily to digital archiving and storytelling work in rhetoric, especially in the classroom (see Florida State University Postcard Archive and Museum of Everyday Writing for good examples; also see Enoch and VanHaitsma). Another popular platform has been Wordpress, which was Tarez Samra Graban used in her early MetaData Mapping Project. Such platforms allow rhetoricians and public historians to share increasingly complex and multifaceted historical narratives and materials with users all over the world, to invite users into critical engagement with and contribution to those materials and narratives, and to overall engage with the rhetoricity of digital and multimodal design. And they do so on easily accessible, user-friendly platforms that do not require coding knowledge on behalf of the project creators. 

While existing projects use a range of platforms or even create their own custom interfaces, we specifically examine the use of Scalar for feminist recovery projects.

Follow the path below to read more background information about Scalar and its use within feminist historiography, or move directly to the Project section to learn more about the original project we created in Scalar, which we use as an example throughout this text, and about holistic considerations we made in that design process. 

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