We centered collaboration and community in both the creation of our an(ti)thology in the course and in the creation of the present webtext, which is authored by the faculty instructor and two student-authors involved in the course project. We invited all student-authors of the an(ti)thology to contribute to this article, and honored the decision of other students to let their contributions end with the completion of the course. Because the project they had created was already published, students were credited as co-authors of the digital an(ti)thology, though they were given the option to have their contribution anonymized (see Stacey Waite, 2017) on crediting students as intellectuals and co-authors). Student-authors who contributed to the original an(ti)thology were separately invited to have their perspectives contribute to the present webtext, either by name or anonymously. Our intent in both of these pieces was to adequately credit and honor the contributions of each student-author to both the creation of our an(ti)thology and to our understanding of its creation, as explored here. 

In our work on our an(ti)thology project, because we weren’t familiar with the full functionality of the platform yet, we didn’t utilize the full range of authorial roles, and instead assigned every contributor to Author status. As Authors, all users of the book are visible to one another on the dashboard, along with their roles and their contributions, making it easy to review the work of one contributor in isolation (which is especially useful for classroom assessment purposes) or to reveal the multiple contributions made to a single page. Because every person’s work is typically visible to and editable by all other authors, small groups were able to work on one entry together, and also to see the work that other groups were developing. 

Seeing one another’s work in process and discussing their decisions together allowed student-authors to be inspired by and learn from one another’s contributions in ways that deepened their engagement and their own critical analytical processes. Describing the challenges faced by the group working on an entry for an anonymous cookbook, one student author found it “interesting to think about the different ways to tackle one's research and gender critique work.” She actively learned from this other group’s research approach, subsequently analyzing her own source “with more attention to the fine details and other unique indicating elements in addition to researching our author's bio and written content” (Student Author 2). 

In their reflections, student-authors commented regularly on the collaborative nature of this work and how it was deepening their understanding of the course. Far from the usual dread of “group work,” student-authors regularly remarked on the collaborative nature of this project as a key feature. Working with these texts in this richly collaborative digital space allowed student-authors to see the ways group work resonated with experiences of shared work elsewhere in their coursework and professional experiences, such as Rachel Gutierrez Valdes, who explained the utility of this collaborative approach in terms of her background in computer programming: 

"As a programmer, I wouldn't imagine working on one big project all by myself, no one has the expertise of everything coding wise. It is up to group work to create a successful project."

In fact, collaboration was a source of confidence for many student authors, who found themselves undertaking unfamiliar and challenging work on this project. In this way, student author Avery Curet productively reframed the challenges of the intellectual task as an opportunity to “ incorporate more perspectives from my group members, especially because I'm much less comfortable tackling this class's content than I would be with another class of mine that's more congruous with my major and existing knowledge base." Jessica Joudy similarly remarked that “For this class, I believe that we can use our groups to gain different perspectives and support each other in our understandings of confusing material and in our archival research efforts."

That shift from “group work” to “incorporating more perspectives” was echoed throughout other reflections as well, and speaks to the intellectual affordances of collaborative digital authorship in Scalar. Student-author Gabrielle Desisto explained the connection between group work and the broader feminist goals around recognizing one’s positionality well: 

I think that group work for this project in particular will be helpful because we'll actually be able to hear other people's input and perspectives that are not our own. I think that, especially since this class focuses so heavily on recognizing your own identity in the way we read and the work we produce, having other people with different identities to confer with will be really exciting and helpful. It will help us to create well-rounded projects that don't just look through the lens of one person's mind.

That is, student-authors working within Scalar were able to see others’ perspectives and contributions as actively shaping their own contributions, and to reflect on the ways their own positionality shaped their work in turn — work that is valued by all feminist scholars who might collaborate on similar projects. 

The Scalar interface design helped us to reach our goals of centering collaboration and relationships and “acknowledg[ing] the real person behind the scholar” (Almjeld et al., 2016) One way this can be done is by naming and elaborating the roles creators and users might take in relation to a webtext. Even within the Author role, student-authors were able to choose how they were identified and credited (or not) on the public-facing version of the project, despite how they were identified on the back end (namely, by the instructor). By tracking individual edits and changes on the back end, unique contributions were visible and traceable, even while groups worked to create a unified voice for their contributions. 

Despite the impulse to create a unified (or anonymized) scholarly voice in their contributions, student-authors were further prompted to acknowledge their own positionality and the ways it informed their scholarly work.