As student-authors began to draft our an(ti)thology project in Scalar, we kept in mind that we would be working within the skeletal framework of “paths” and “tagging.”  The beginnings of our process involved experimentation in a sandbox file before creating actual copy pages. Still, there are many navigational possibilities left unconsidered and unfulfilled. 

While we wrote our chapter on our specific author, we were aware that we were contributing to a broader inquiry into feminist recovery and themes about technofeminism that would map out and group together our messages for users, though we couldn’t yet imagine what those maps and groupings would look like in the end. 

Within their own sections, each group used paths to organize the materials relevant to their own author, which most often included the writer’s biography, themes, and introduction to their manuscript, and a digital surrogate of the work itself. For instance, in the section on Dinah Mulock Craik, the first page describes her positionality and materiality as a British female author that informs her writing in her 1858 self-help book “A Woman’s Thoughts About Women”.  The next three pages provide a brief introduction to text, along with three chapters in her manuscript.  Complications emerged in this group’s research as we learned about her childhood, marriage life, and background, which might best be explored through tags or other functionality, but the origination of paths dominates, shaping the chapter overall in the image of a traditional research paper.  

Another design painpoint arose when trying to use paths to create a streamlined navigation system across anthology sections: each group handled the introduction to their anthologized author differently.  Some introductions contain their own set of “Contents” that further contextualize the author’s life and writing distinctly from the rest of the selections, while contextualizations from other selections are embedded into the book’s overarching Path.  Some entries were dead-end paths without an option to continue to the next section, leaving a user stuck on a page without the option to continue along the paths linearly. There was a lot of work to be done in trying to make these smaller subpaths articulate with the broader trajectory of the book as whole. 

In order to facilitate connections between and among writers, which was a goal of our project in relation to social circulation, each group also determined their own set of tags, such as feminism, religion, and self-determination (for example, see the tags from Dinah Mulock Craik). We linked all the tags together on the “Themes” page to serve as a glossary.  They can also be found at the bottom of each page of content.  Student-author Samantha Rusnak reflects that these structural possibilities are most beneficial for complex arguments where relationships are valued, allowing the work to be “ less rigid and linear."  However, these tags were not standardized among student-authors, and some were not connected to any other authors or pages, rendering them less useful as navigational or interpretive resources. 

Initially, we engaged in generative discussions about which keywords would be significant and how to define them to open possibilities for tags to assist in selective reading experiences. For example, we grappled with the question of how to define "feminism," and whether that would even be a useful tag in the context of this feminist project, where almost anything might be tagged as such. Because our definition of “feminism” throughout the quarter was ever-changing, simply tagging every page with “feminism” felt limiting.  One solution to this issue was using the “Themes'' page (which consists of a glossary of the tags) as not only a strict list of definitions but also a reflection on how these selections represent the tag.  We laid out the complications we encountered to acknowledge the “why” behind tagging feminism.

We encountered other challenges with determining the sequence of the paths, the design of each page, the insertion of pictures and webtext, and the hyperlinks to each tag.  While the print anthologies we read, including Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s Man Cannot Speak for Her (1993), Shirley Wilson-Logan’s With Pen and Voice (1995), Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald’s Available Means: An Anthology Of Women's Rhetoric(s) (2001), were organized in chapters separated by each author’s introduction and entries, we organized our digital an(ti)thology according to the author within multiple paths and tags dedicated to each entry. Tagging allowed our writing to follow multiple, enveloping systems of organization simultaneously, such as might be found in anthology organized by genre, time period, or place, but here unrestrained by the page-turning usually required to move between ordered book sections or chapters.  

One student-author calls the project “controlled chaos” which she clarifies is “an exaggeration, but I love how there can be so many different paths of thoughts, tags, and media types” (Student-Author 1). This variety in navigation represents the larger theme that there should be flexibility in how we as students define literature and think about anthologization processes. Scalar’s capacity for storing information helps us to interrogate what constitutes writing overall. Rich Shivener (2020) uses the phrase “rhetorical affective workflow” to describe such chaotic sequences of metacognitive processes while writing webtext production (p. 46). He recalls the mix of confusion, fear, and stress when trying to juggle writing, design, and content. This concept resonates strongly with us as we reflect back on the process of designing our webtext, particularly in relation to the navigational possibilities of paths, tags, and visualizations. In response, we considered our relationship to the an(ti)thology and reproduction of information, using Fancher’s “Technofeminist Design” (2017) as a guiding reminder. Fancher’s argument for a free design structure prizes the visual ability to bridge together connections between our embodied selves as writers, editors, readers, and users.  Drawing on the technical possibilities of Scalar, voices were reproduced, sharpened, and amplified. 

Additionally, in our an(ti)thology, we linked student-author reflections using Tags to the respective student-author written content to provide a navigational path for our editorial decisions and positionalities to be made visible to the reader. We wanted to acknowledge that by producing our Scalar project, we “made ourselves visible to each other using the strategies available to us” (Fancher, 2017). As we implicate ourselves in the ongoing history of feminist rhetoric and recovery, we can refer to Almjeld et al. (2017)’s definition of “positioned” as that recognizes how critical it is to “recognize one’s positionality when conducting research and the ways that position might impact participants.” As a byproduct of our work, we uncovered ourselves — including our biases, experiences, backgrounds, and scholarly understanding — in the project. Or as Kristen Arola (2010) puts it, “Design functions to make meaning and create selves" (p. 6). The navigation system represents the ways in which we, as student-authors, aimed to produce accessible and engaging design practices for users of Scalar.