Composing Collaborative Feminist Recovery Projects with Scalar

Conclusions: Collaborative Authoring

Scalar allowed us to engage collaborative authorship and also to make that collaborative labor visible, inserting ourselves actively into a network of feminists and rhetoricians as part of the work of recovery, attending, as rhetoricians do, not only to content but also to "an object's context, its use and reception through time, our relation to it, and its future historiographic perceptions" (Graban et al., 2015, p. 234). Scalar allowed us to reflect this attention in the design of our project, particularly through the use of metadata visualizations. 

Of course, there are some complications to composing complex multi-authored digital projects, such as the chaotic metadata (and resulting visualizations) that can result without a more centralized house-style guide in use. We would have benefitted from more pre-planning and a more intentional workflow. Having a more defined plan of work at the outset would have helped us navigate some of the complexities of collaborative authorship, and utilizing the additional user roles that we did not use to structure the work on this project would have likely streamlined our collaborative work as well. But overall, the affordances of Scalar for collaborative work widely outstretched any limitations, particularly in allowing us to visualize and center our own embodied experiences as part of the contents of the book. The Scalar platform allowed us to embrace feminist values of collaboration, relationality, shared knowledge-making, and social circulation in both the process of creation and in our conceptualization of how our text would be read and understood by future readers.

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