Digital rhetoricians have long been calling for enhanced digital practices in our scholarship and teaching, arguing, with McPherson (2009) that humanists must “rethink their allegiance to print” and become “multimodal scholars” who make use of and explore “new forms of literacy” (p. 120). Through such digital multimodal work, scholars and audiences encounter scholarship differently and engage and inhabit their work in potentially more imaginative, productive, and liberatory ways. Building on the work of feminist scholars who have recently highlighted the generative potentials of digital archives and archival-based work in these same ways (Gold and Enoch, 2013; Enoch and Bessette, 2013; Gallon; McPherson, 2016; Enoch and VanHaistma, 2015; Morris, 2006), this project has used our own experiences to demonstrate how Scalar’s digital platform can be used to advance this work, aligning with feminist values articulated by Almjeld et al. (2016) and others. We hope to have shown that Scalar is an example of a technology that feminist researchers can use to contribute to feminist recovery scholarship in ways that make their own embodied processes and that of the user visible and accessible. 

Working within Scalar, feminist recovery can be experienced and revealed as a performative, rather than merely constative act (Frank, 2017). Through the choices made in relation to parts, paths, and people, creators are invited to actively consider and reflect on the processes of recovery and role of their own positionality in that work. The flexibility of the digital composing environment foregrounds those choices, revealing them as political and ideological. Meanwhile, the relative ease of access invites other feminist recovery projects that speak back to and complicate the work they encounter in a volume such as our an(ti)thology, continuing that performative act and extending its reach. 

As we hope to have demonstrated through an examination of our own experience using Scalar for feminist recovery, this platform has tremendous feminist potential for disrupting traditional historiographic approaches and narratives, facilitating collaboration, allowing for a constellation of figures and experiences to emerge, and highlighting networks of interconnection. Deconstructed, non-linear, and free form, it is especially open to examinations of rhetoricity and design in archival work, enabling forms that resist master narratives and limiting organizational hierarchies in recovery work. The dynamic interface allowed us to position ourselves in this work and to exemplify feminist recovery as a performative practice.

Again, we found it to be true that the intellectual work accomplished within Scalar is unavoidably structured by the interface, which privileges rich media, intertextuality, and non-linear, recursive reading pathways (see Selfe and Selfe, 1994). This is not a bad thing. However, creators and users must contend with this reality of alternative logics in contrast to more traditional ways of designing their writing for print. The ideologies and practices embedded within the interface ended up being a particular feminist affordance, encouraging us to examine our own deeply rooted habits of thinking and writing that come from hegemonic traditions, even as we struggled to imagine the text otherwise. We invite others to further explore how this interface can serve as part of the "technology of recovery" to fill gaps between Black studies, feminist historiography, and digital humanities (Gallon, 2016). 

More functionality to discover

Our own project could have gone much further in the feminist directions we outline here, and this article discusses only a portion of the available functionality. For example, the tagging feature is one functionality that we have not fully utilized in either our sample project or in this webtext. Ideally, the ability to tag anything with anything else to create multidirectional networks and pathways through content could enable radical departures from linear argument structures. We found that our own way of thinking about argument is still so closely pinned to traditional print forms and organizations that it was hard for us to conceptualize richer ways to use this functionality. However, the consideration of tagging as an option did help us re-examine our own assumptions about content and organization as composers, and will shape our feminist practices in future compositions. 

Another example is the use of visualizations in our own projects. We’ve already mentioned that our original an(ti)thology project under-utilized visualizations as a navigational structure. Still, the process of examining our own project through the lens of this metadata productively disrupted our assumptions about "content,” providing opportunities for further question-building, rather than for mapping static content and relations (Graban, 2013). Reviewing these visualizations shapes the way authors organize their own content, as they reveal unintended relationships and patterns in one's own work, regardless of the role these visualizations play in the final product. 

Similarly, the variety of roles and their purposes to the interface could be further developed to shape workflow and collaborative possibilities, such as the possibility of formalizing project review and inviting contributions from public users. Again, this ability to designate roles within the interface was different from how we are used to assigning roles, so it was easier for us to simply negotiate those roles through discussion and assign everyone involved the role of Author, whether they were listed on the project's by-line or not. At a certain point, we found ourselves just simply fatigued by the prospect of learning a new functionality and considering it for this project. However, the prospect of assigning these roles did lead our thinking about the project and the nature of contributions in new directions. As we continue to use these kinds of platforms in our research and scholarship, we believe these alternative ways of thinking will become more natural, opening up new vistas for feminist rhetoric and recovery work. 

These are all parts of the politics of the interface that led us towards more liberatory, feminist questions and approaches. Our hope is that introducing these Scalar features allows subsequent feminist historiographers to take up the tool with a better sense of its critical rhetorical potentials, drawing on the work of Frank (2017), not just to produce feminist histories as such, but to enact feminist history and feminist futures as if. 

To support this work, we close with some practical tips drawn from our own experience working with Scalar, which we hope will help ease the way for other feminist rhetoricians interested in exploring the affordances of Scalar in their work.