Conclusion: Overall Reflections on Feminist Recovery in Scalar
More functionality to discover
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, 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.In fact, our project could have gone much further in this direction, 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. But 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. Similarly, we did not think systematically yet about the varying roles available in the interface and how those would shape workflow and collaborative possibilities, including the possibility of 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, 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.
Our hope is that introducing these features in this context allows subsequent feminist historiographers to take up the tool with a better sense of its critical rhetorical potentials, drawing on the work of Sarah Noble Frank, not just to produce feminist histories as such, but to enact feminist history and feminist futures as if.