As student authors began to draft the project, they kept in mind that they would be working within the skeletal framework of “paths” and “tagging”.  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.  Students comment on how the functionality of Scalar engages with and informs the audience about the content.  The site templates and design informed our introduction of the author’s selection.  We used paths within the chapter on the authors’ selections to categorize the writer’s biographies, themes, and introduce their manuscripts.  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 (which can be accessed at the bottom of the page in chronological or nonchronological order) provide a brief introduction to and insertion of three of her chapters in her manuscript.  Each page has its own tag, such as feminism, religion, and self-determination. 

Navigational Choices of Writer and Reader

Our organizational choices stem from the broader goals of the project to use feminist recovery and archival work to open up rhetorical space for silenced and invisible voices.  The chapter “Student Reflections,” for instance, unpacks how individual students’ embodied experience and positionality influences how they constructed knowledge and thus the design or content choices. By linking those student reflections using tags to the content, we provide a pathway through the material that renders the editorial decisions visible and implicates ourselves in the ongoing history of feminist rhetoric and recovery. This allowed us to acknowledge that we produced the Scalar project making individual choices that reflect and embody our experiences, “mak[ing] ourselves visible to each other using the strategies available to us” (Fancher). 

The options for the navigation system spurred a swath of different concepts to come to interesting fruition in design, as we contended with making our relationship to the work and chosen selections close, and this closeness clear for a reader whenever reproducing information for the selections we wrote, because of a guiding reminder we shared in Patricia Fancher’s “Technofeminist Design.” Fancher’s argument for a free design structure which made the connections behind a piece of work visible and prized the visual and osychic ability of bridging those connections between our embodied selves as writers or editors, perhaps the readers as a welcomed spectator, was complicated in the technical abilities of Scalar. Voices we reproduced and tried to sharpen, amplify, may not ever be done full justice, in view of the ever-present invisibility of their embodiment on any hypertext platform, Scalar or otherwise. 

Embodiment of Student Writers

As students, as a byproduct of our work, we uncovered ourselves — including our biases, experiences, backgrounds, and scholarly understanding — in the project.  Or as Fancher quotes Kristen Arola, “Design functions to make meaning and create selves” (Fancher).  The navigation system represents the ways in which we as students aimed to produce accessible and engaging design practices.

Additionally, we intended to use digital storytelling as a way to welcome public audiences, consisting of archivists, rhetoricians, feminists, and educators, to challenge their understanding of canonization.  We hoped to organize the media content in a clear and digestible way that allows for “friction”, as Romeo García called it, to come to surface. García explains, drawing on the work of anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, that it might be “more productive to approach listening via the definition of friction as that which gets in the way of ‘smooth’ hegemonic flows” (14).  We pursued this project to create rhetorical space for writers that have never been anthologized by way of the flexible navigation system.

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 navigability represents the larger theme that there should be flexibility in how we as students define literature.  Scalar’s capacity for storing information helps us to interrogate what constitutes writing overall.