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Composing Collaborative Feminist Recovery Projects with Scalar

Tag Visualization of Our Project

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Parts: Versatility in Organization 40 plain 2022-03-05T13:38:46-08:00
Scalar offers several different ways to present content in a book, each of which compels the author to consider why they are including the information or media, and how they imagine a user interacting with it. This is because the “parts” of a Scalar book are always already in relation to other media within and outside of the book--as tags, paths, and/or embeddable media. In brief, the various ways to present content in Scalar include variously formatted rich text pages, embedded media, and visualizations. In each instance, determining the “parts'' of a Scalar book is open to possibilities; it is not pre-determined by linear structure or traditional media, as in physical books.
When making design decisions, it is important to consider how various content options align with your goals for representation and engagement. Because Scalar’s interface is relational and nonlinear, content is inseparable from form and navigation. For example, a tagged image is both its own page and a navigational pathway.. Other content types are just as versatile, so an organized systematic approach is critical.
Pages
The most familiar and common form of content in a Scalar book is a page, which is designed using a versatile rich text editor to combine text, images, and other media and visualizations. The author can insert a page by clicking the "plus" button in the upper right hand corner of any Scalar page when in editing mode In the textbox that appears, the author can compose text, embed a range of media (including notes and widgets), make layout and style decisions, and create relationships (including Paths, Comments, Annotations, and Tags) with other pages. While rich text editors for content are fairly familiar to digital users, some of the available options for crafting content on Pages are unique and worth briefly overviewing. These features make for richly visual and interconnected content pages by easily embedding a range of internally and externally hosted media.
- Media links- create a widget to display a small preview of a linked media file at the page margin. The preview preserves the hyperlinked text as written, like this link and the preview on the right.
- Inline media links- create a widget displaying a small preview of the linked media file that replaces the hyperlinked text and can be placed on its own line or with text wrapping, like the widget on the next line
- Scalar notes- inserts a small note icon and a hyperlink to a page or media file already existing within the Scalar project, the content of which displays a small title card with information about the linked source when clicked, like this.
- Inline Scalar note- replaces the hyperlinked text with a small title card that displays information about the linked source which can be clicked to navigate to the full respective page source, like this:
- Scalar Widgets- can generate a variety of interactive visualizations, like a map, a timeline, a carousel of media, or other visualizations of selected contents which are hyperlinked to text like this link and the visualization on the right
- Inline Scalar Widgets- create visualizations as explained above, but will fully replace the hyperlinked text with the visualization, as below:
As you can see, the default views of these different embed functions, without careful trial and error adjustment of settings, often leave something to be desired or may be overwhelming or confusing. Thus, in the present webtext we have often opted to display content via screen-capture or screenshot, embedded as media, rather than overutilizing more dynamic live embedding options.
It is also useful to note that the default options of the dialogue box or window which appears when applying each of these embed functions — that is, a list of Media when creating a Media Link and a list of Pages when creating a Note — are not the only options available. Instead, you can choose to embed any page as a Media Link, and any Media as a Note, in addition to other diverse content options. These possibilities require editor decisions about both the Page currently being edited and about the content currently being embedded.

Media
Media is a separate content form within Scalar, with its own process for creation and formatting. Media are pages themselves, and can be annotated, linked, or embedded using the options such as those described above. The author can create media pages by clicking the "downward arrow" icon in the upper right corner of any Scalar page’s toolbar to upload or link to media.
Media can come from affiliated archives, including Critical Commons, Internet Archive, Shoah Foundation, and other archives (esp. Omeka, Soundcloud and Youtube); it can be uploaded directly to Scalar; or it can be hyperlinked. Most Media will not be housed on Scalar's servers, which has a fairly small file size limit (2 MB), but instead will be embedded from an external source, such as YouTube,Vimeo, or other archives. This can be frustrating for folks hoping to build archives or database projects who don't have server space established for hosting their digital surrogates elsewhere, but Scalar is most effective as an interpretive layer on top of other archives and databases than as an archive itself.
Indeed, the ability to embed directly from digital archives elsewhere is a major feature for those working on archival projects, though there are some complications to using this feature. First, not all archives or servers will allow Scalar to directly embed content, so those working with digital archives should ensure that their target archive is able to be fully embedded. You will also need to ensure that the archive will be sufficiently permanent so that the embed link in Scalar will not break in the future (this was a consideration in the design of our present webtext which led us not to utilize this function here). If an archive does not already exist that you want to work with, you can always create an archive of your own, such as in Omeka, and then embed content in your Scalar project from there. At the same time, pay attention to the file format used during digitization, as different file formats enable different kinds of interaction and annotation within Scalar’s interface, as discussed in our experience on the following page.

Visualizations
Visualizations in Scalar are computational tools that "text mine" the book to dynamically engineer conceptual and/or technical interpretations of the text. In "Digital Pedagogy Unplugged", Paul Fyfe argues that acts of creating patterns in the text consist of “reading from the middle, except that it alternates close and distant perspectives to generate its critical current” (4). Between close reading and distant reading, Scalar visualizations reveal these algorithms within the text, allowing users to think creatively in interpretation, and make useful links between the materiality and digital texts. For example,

a tag visualization creates a glossary of key terms that challenge their standard definitions by connecting themes and content. They manipulate the traditional use of a glossary by creating opportunities to create patterns, visualize different perspectives, and tease out differences between texts. Again, reviewing these visualizations reveals potentially unintended relationships and patterns in one's own work, shaping design and content decisions in an iterative fashion. As Graban et al. argue of metadata projects more broadly, these tools entail alternative approaches to what "content" is. Moving from assumptions of containment and stability, they allow scholars to "imagine new kinds of relations among texts and users rather than only representing relations according to traditional taxonomies of storage and use" (239). These new ‘relations’ (a key term on the backend of Scalar’s interface)) necessitate alternative design decisions in turn.
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.