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• 1 2021-11-17T03:36:53-08:00 In Our Experience: The Project 20 plain 2023-08-06T07:57:10-07:00

  Scalar provided student-authors in our course with digital space to map out our media and analysis and reflect on the rhetoricity of the digital project we were composing. As the digital work really got underway, we also read more scholarship to help us reflect on our digital design practice, such as Patricia Fancher's (2017) influential online article from which student-authors ended up deriving their an(ti)thology’s subtitle. Fancher helped students to consider the array of technofeminist design possibilities available to them and to meditate in particular on the role of their own embodied experiences, considering how materiality and affect could be rendered visible within their text. 

  As we continued to read more scholarship and anthologies, and to work with the digital platform to accomplish our own recovery efforts, we came to realize that digital recovery is complicated. But we also came to appreciate that as a strength. 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. As one student-author put it, feminist recovery does “not need to be ‘clean’ or fit within a certain mold” (Samantha Rusnak) — an insight that led us nicely into our work with Scalar and its various functionalities. 
  
  For instance, the image below is a screenshot from the section on Mary Wollstonecraft in which the student-authors identify four themes in her anthologized text and delve into them further using the Visual Path function.
  
  

  It was not until late in our process that we considered the possible value of having more of a centralized and holistic vision for our project, with more of a house-style driving our design choices. We assigned two student-editors (both of whom are now authors of the current article) to oversee the book at this holistic level, notice important revisions that should be made for consistency or usability, and help to generate the content of the book that transcended any given section. For example, those editors oversaw the generation of the map page and oversaw the tagging system that was to interconnect the various contributions thematically.

  Under the guidance of these leaders, the class made some project-level decisions to provide consistency. For example, we asked all groups to create a splash page to introduce their selection, with standardized naming conventions for those pages, so that a reader had that visual marker to indicate the transition between project sections. This also allowed for a more uniform visualization of the book’s contents when viewed as a whole. It helped to enhance the relationality and interconnection between the separate an(ti)thology entries–itself an important feminist goal. 
  
  In retrospect, it would have been beneficial to have some of these high-level concerns and decisions established earlier on, but it was also sufficient to address them in a later-stage editorial review. As it is, the project features quite varied style and navigation choices that we worried might be disruptive or confusing to the reader. We decided to keep it that way, though, to emphasize the different voices and perspectives that were shaping this work and to let them remain visible and, we think, charmingly chaotic. For us, preserving this specificity and marks of difference in various groups' contributions was a means by which we accomplished our feminist goal of revealing our embodiment and positionality as composers of the piece.