Cautions and Conclusions
Cautions
- Consider establishing a more intentional workflow at the outset, with opportunities for review and revision of that plan built in
- Consider the metadata necessary to make texts', authors', and/or readers' affective experience and embodiment visible, if you choose to do so
- Take advantage of the collaborative nature of the platform by reviewing what other authors are doing differently with the interface and reconsidering design possibilities.
Conclusions
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. 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. But overall, the affordances of Scalar for collaborative work widely outstretched any limitations. 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.