Student-authors’ process of digital project creation in Scalar allowed us to embrace the emergent and provisional connections between our recovered texts and ourselves as feminist rhetorical scholars. As we reflected on the political and ontological project of recovery, we found that exploring a variety of formats was intellectually generative: it stimulated a sense of curiosity and deliberation as to how we chose to introduce the recovered writer in each section and compelled us to think carefully about connections between authors and sections as well. We allowed ourselves to work piece by piece and let a structure emerge gradually, deciding not to smooth over every difference on a project-wide level. The project’s incongruities revealed for us transformative insights about the potentially competing interests in recovering an author or text and engaging users in a reflection on the acts of recovery itself. It helped us to see our own role in actively constructing this text, individually and collectively, and also to consider ways to make this embodied process visible to our readers, through the incorporation of maps that included our own locations, photographs of ourselves, personal reflections, and other means. 

At the same time, we would suggest future Scalar authors have a sense of the project as a whole before they set out to produce work. The intellectual work accomplished within Scalar is unavoidably structured by the interface, which privileges rich media, intertextuality, and non-linear, recursive reading pathways. Thus, content creators would benefit from reflecting on their own goals of recovery in advance, considering how design decisions within Scalar can facilitate or hinder those goals. 

If we were to engage the process again, we would have liked to communicate with each student-author in advance about standardizing our vocabulary and tagging to make further insights about rhetorical feminist recovery available through design, allowing us to utilize more of the visualization features in Scalar as well.