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Composing Collaborative Feminist Recovery Projects with Scalar

Mary Wollstonecraft

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In Our Experience
In our digital anthology, student authors chose an archival text to recover and feature, and the content of the book were a series of recovered texts and research-based critical commentary about those texts. Each selection was chosen to further goals of feminist recovery, but this vision was shaped by the particular tools and features of the Scalar program.
Uploading Works to Our Collection

The primary media featured in our Scalar book was digitized selections from our university's Archives & Special Collections, including works by Eliza Bradley, Frances Power Cobbe, Dinah Mulock Craik, Lola Montez, Phillis Wheatley, Sarah Winnemucca, Mary Wollstonecraft, and an anonymously authored women's recipe book. Students selected excerpts for digitization, as many of the texts were not previously digitized by our Archives and Special Collections staff. Though digital versions were available elsewhere, it was important to us to engage the local specificity of our own holdings--an example of the local and global interface in digital archives (Graban et al). To prepare the selections for our production, archival staff took photos using a digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera in Adobe Lightroom. The files were converted to TIFF files, edited for light, and eventually saved for Scalar as JPG files. We then hosted these files on our institutional instance of Omeka.

Given the limited file size for media on Scalar, we planned to host these images on our own Archives and Special Collections (A&SC) digital collections. However, we found that the data output by our A&SC website was not compatible with Scalar, as our website did not allow the data to be scrubbed and embedded in an external website, and neither did the Omeka sites hosted on our campus servers. This setting was controlled with a header set at the web server level (Content-Security-Policy for frame-ancestors). This header, though, could be overridden in a .htaccess file within our site, which gave the option to allow iframing of certain content on certain sites.If you have control over the settings of a website and server, you might be able to adjust this setting. Once we did so, we were able to host images of the selected texts on our institutional instance of Omeka, which then interfaced very nicely with Scalar. Indeed, Omeka is one of the "other archives" options pre-populated into the Scalar interface in addition to their affiliated archives.

With our digitizations available to embed, we then turned our minds to analysis and curation. It is important to note that PDF files, which allow for Optical Character Recognition (OCR), are not compatible with Scalar’s annotation features — a lesson we learned the hard way in our own trial and error process. Typically, an Adobe Acrobat user can attach annotated comments directly to text of a PDF file, making the reference of each specific because the program recognizes each text character. However, this feature isn’t utilized in Scalar; instead, the annotation feature groups text with the use of a click-and-drag box dragged over any area of the file, treating the files more traditionally as visual images. Annotations allow close textual work that attends to specific discursive features of a given text or media object. However, the annotations leave little room for freeform visual references to the text, in the symbols used or ability to cordon how much of the file is altered. The inability to shorten the pop-up windows with annotations could cause reader confusion, such as in Winnemucca’s excerpt. As a result, a reader might be confused by large annotation boxes that refer to a general area or overlap with a note that appears, and would be likely to be even more confused if the annotation is designated as a path itself, which is an option within Scalar. So, the construction of the pages was not without technical challenges which presented themselves aside from rhetorical concerns. While we later learned about the hypothes.is plugin available for Scalar annotations, we did not have experience with it in our work, and our resulting projects use other varied approaches that are probably less effective.

As a result of different file presentation choices, the scope of each analysis widely varied. Some pages discuss the text holistically, like through the analysis of writings both by and about Phillis Wheatley, for example outside a contextual “close read.” Others annotate the imaged selections with commentary highlighting larger themes and connections. Still others transcribe the text from outside the image and onto the webpage (as in the case of the Women’s Recipe Book, which was in manuscript form).
Layout of Our Chapters

The recovered text was the centerpiece of each "chapter," contextualized by research-based critical commentary and other relevant media located through online searches to contextualize the featured selection. For example, the chapter on Mary Wollstonecraft features a rare book seller’s description as embedded media. Groups varied in their approaches to layout for the embedded selections, where annotations may or may not appear, and the embedded media for some selections would be at the start of the page, or after a short summary.

Within their respective “chapters,” student authors primarily represented their selections and other component media through Pages, which were the primary anchors for content sharing. These pages were not uniformly named or organized, but instead reflected the priorities and organizational schema of individual authors and project groups, representing the selected recovered texts in widely varying ways. In fact, there is considerable difference between the lengths of selections, the file type used, and other representational choices. Pages dedicated to Eliza Bradley, for example, featured multiple excerpts from Bradley’s larger work, instead of multiple pages constituting a single excerpt, while multiple excerpts from Frances Cobbe totaled around 60 pages embedded as a PDF frame, allowing a user to read the excerpt through an Adobe viewer without changing pages on Scalar.

To achieve cohesion, we collectively decided to have an introductory splash page before each, which would appear as a "part" in the Table of Contents. We also chose to separate analysis and the text by substituting annotated images for clickable, redirecting notes taking the reader to a full uploaded file of the whole selected work from the digital collection, like in the case of the first page of the Lola Montez section. As we illustrated on the previous page, a note can be “inline” or not, and appears either adjacent to the main content of a page in the sidebar or at the end of a page, forming another column that allows you to navigate to another page, as if flipping through a book to the notes section and finding the respective number. This function neatly categorized referenced sources or further explanations. This style could be used inline to provide a link with a sort of preview: text that appears next to the link button from the page it directs to. Or, it could separate the link further like a tag at the bottom of the page. Yet unlike a tag, the note would probably be specific to the page, since the program makes it more convenient to connect multiple tags to a page than notes.
Other Features of Our Anthology
Links allowed for direct bibliographic integration. In the case of Frances Power Cobbe’s selection, for example, readable frames of referential articles are included on the page. This was accomplished by adding a hyperlink between the parentheses of a citation, which all directed towards an included bibliography page, what we’ll call an intertextual hyperlink. On the other hand, a link could also open a portal outside of the Scalar project to the broader world wide web, directing a reader to any URL, creating intertextual connections. They could be used to provide context for another figure mentioned in conjunction with the analysis, such as the one used in the introduction to Eliza Bradley. Because the reader may not be aware whether the link will take them outside of the Scalar book, we have subsequently considered how a warning could have beenuseful as a presentational touch.
A final notable content type in our project is the visualizations, which provide a unique, synthesizing vision of the larger work and feature those relationships as content in their own right. For instance, the map visualization and timeline visualization give a sense of distance from, as well as connection to, the reader’s embodiment who may decide of all sections to maybe click Dinah Mulock Craik’s, simply because they are also in the UK. Other visualizations, such as the logistical feature that can map all pages in the book to a “thoughtmap” or heuristic, more specifically cleared up the reflective aspect on structure in our case. The practicality of the visual web seemed like it may appear confusing to a reader that didn’t participate in the making of the pages. Still, this both emphasized the ever complex nature of arranging authors into a collection at the same time as proving less useful for its more apparent purpose of making detail clear.
A table of contents and pop-up menu bar structured options to return to any other place in the text, helping the reader out of situations where they may be stuck without a way to return to a specific page through other functions like links, tags, notes or visualizations. At the same time, these tools were dependent on reader awareness of where to move the cursor. The beginnings of our process suggested consultation with a sandbox file before creating actual copy pages.
The function of tagging within Scalar has the potential to produce particularly generative visualizations, as it provides a way to broadly link pages through a word or phrase. It is similar to the hashtag of social media structures. Allowing for overlaps of general concepts, we used them as a way to navigate between recognized and collectively composed themes that might apply to some of the analyses we completed. The tagging tool, compared to others, was intriguing at the beginning of class drafting when we reflected about its possibilities for creating unique and selective reading experiences. In practice, it allowed our writing to follow enveloping yet specified subjects, like an anthology might be organized by genre, time period, or place, yet unlike ordered book sections or chapters in the way they set page-turning waypoints that could move from one page to many others.

For example, this tag visualization shows how content is interconnected in a web-like structure in our project. The dot represents a piece of content, color-coded by type. If one clicks on a dot, the item is selected.

As you can see, our projects' tags appear frenetic. However, there is potential for reorganization to enable better contextualization with the text. Here is a tag visualization from the Scalar website.
Project: Our An(ti)thology 18 plain 2022-08-02T11:27:49-07:00
We began by reviewing several print anthologies, especially those focused on recovering women’s and other marginalized voices, and observing the ways they organized their selections and made a case for their significance. We also read scholarship that helped us to think critically about the acts of recovery and circulation of women’s texts, including the famous exchange between Barbara Biesecker and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell about feminist recovery and recent work such as by Wendy Sharer specifically analyzing anthologization practices. As the quarter progressed, we interrogated the meaning of being a “woman” as defined by mainstream feminist studies by incorporating queer theory (Rawson), ethnic studies (Garcia), and cultural studies (Wu) into our understanding of gender politics. In conversation with scholarship, we also read a range of uncanonized works of literature in the Santa Clara University archives, and engaged reflection as a regular facet of feminist intellectual practice.
Through such readings and reflections, we encountered the stakes of feminist recovery work to revaluate what feminism should look like within literature and rhetorical studies, exploring concepts like female tokenism that comes along with canonization, and found value in analyzing included and excluded works to place in our anthology. As a result of these perspectives, we came to the conclusion that studying gender politics within the relative context of the author’s life experiences, time, and geographical location makes a difference in literary and rhetorical analysis, connecting the authors' contexts to our own in our analytical and theoretical work.
Opening Up Space
The resulting project — “Opening Up Space: A Lovely Technofeminist Opportunity” — is a feminist recovery effort. Crossing disciplines among literature, communication, and rhetoric and others to refigure women into a remembered history, the project centers varied textual selections along the continuum of women’s print history to render women’s historical experience and voice apparent. We call this an “an(ti)thology” because of the ways it is an active response to anthologization practices and the limits inherent to this task. Our an(ti)thology responds to these practices by subverting chronological or hierarchical ordering and making equal reference to the positionality and embodiment of the editors and cited authors, uniting the participants through space and across time. In particular sections of the book, such as the reflections section, these interconnections and the role of the editors are especially visible, but they are evident throughout in the diverse modes of approaching intertextual analysis and textual presentation employed throughout. The presentation practices of mixing analysis and personal reflection works with the design and content to also show the “traces of the everyday” that Michelle Levy, drawing on Franco Moretti, has observed within book history.

Largely focused around artifacts from the long 19th century, the purpose of each selection in this an(ti)thology was never to stand alone, but rather to illuminate conversational themes that connect historical women to one another and to readers in the present. The specific texts that students researched and recovered as part of this project (in alphabetical order by author) included:
- Eliza Bradley, An Authentic Narrative of the Shipwreck and Sufferings of Mrs. Eliza Bradley (1820)
- Frances Power Cobbe- The Duties of Women (1881)
- Lola Montez- The Arts of Beauty; or, Secrets of a Lady’s Toilet (1858)
- Dinah Mulock Craik -A Woman’s Thoughts About Women (1858)
- John Wheatley- “Some Account of Phillis, a Learned Negro Girl” (1778)
- Sarah Winnemucca- Life Among the Piutes (1883)
- Mary Wollstonecraft- Original Stories from Real Life (1791)
- Women's Recipe Book (circa 1822-1866)
As you can see from this list, the texts spanned more than a century and at least two continents, and were attributed to a range of authors--including one man--in a number of different forms, some more traditionally literary than others. While each text is quite rare, the authors do enjoy different levels of notoriety, with some of them being quite famous authors, while one text is completely unattributed but written in several different women’s hands.
The texts in this volume may occupy liminal space in cultural discourse, but their collection in this volume makes an argument not for their significance--not the significance of these discrete and specific texts and writers so much as for a transformed and transformative approach to thinking about literary and cultural history writ large. Our vision was not that this volume would be assigned and studied in other courses so much as replicated by and intertextually linked to innumerable multimodal scholars composing volumes of their own.

Building this project in Scalar allowed each contributor to make their own decisions about how to approach analysis and design, disrupting the expectation of a single authorial voice in favor of a chaotic polyvocality, while also highlighting themes that emerged for us across these texts, informed by the scholarship we read.

Click on the project image below to view the actual project we created in Scalar, which has been copied here and included in its entirety. Or, simply click through to In Our Experience below the project view to continue with our discussion of the composing process.