Because Scalar’s interface is relational, content is inseparable from form and navigation, and choices about content and design are foregrounded as intentional and political. 

The content options in Scalar are diverse and flexible, encouraging active decisions about what media to feature and how. Like Ashley Reed, we found this feature allowed us to privilege decisions about content, allowing us to save questions about assembling the an(ti)thology text until later in the process. However, we weren’t entirely prepared to confront the complex realities of this assemblage on the backend, having worked independently and without standard vocabularies or formats in the early stages. The Scalar 2 User Guide explains that Scalar is “much more than a collection of discrete pages; it's the relationships between those pages and their media that ultimately give the book its shape.”  In our experience, their hope for the user to “take the building blocks of online publishing (sequenced posts, tags, and more) and apply them in new ways” requires some forethought about what those “discrete pages” are and how they are presented, in order to facilitate meaningful relationships between them that are legible to users. Without this forethought and planning across pages, the resulting connections are apt to be experienced as a muddled mess of incongruous parts.

Questions about where to house and how to link to or embed featured media were also a bit more complicated than we anticipated. Having a better understanding of the hosting limitations of the platform and the ways file types would dictate presentation and annotation features would have been beneficial both for individual groups and for the user’s experience of the an(ti)thology project as a whole.  

The most productive aspect of Scalar’s content features, from a technofeminist perspective, was the built-in visualization functionality, which draws on project metadata to create new content. With these visualizations and the interpretive perspectives they offer, we were better equipped to take our own positionality into account, using the patterns revealed there to question our content and design decisions. Almjeld et al.’s term “positioned” is relevant here, as we used these visualizations to locate ourselves in relation to our work, acknowledging our privileges and limitations when conducting research and attempting to disrupt our own ways of seeing our work and to instead re-see our project through the lens of metadata.  This prompted us to further foreground our own choices and positionality in our content. By considering our own positionality and showcasing it in our digital work, we hoped to contribute to the social iterative process of feminist recovery that challenges methods of presentation and organization to build a diverse community of writers, including our anthologized authors, our audiences, and ourselves.