The variety of content types and presentational formats available on Scalar allows for the medium to challenge the rhetorical tradition that has previously privileged patriarchal writing systems through interconnected and interactive organizational structure.  It prompts the user to explore unique methods of representation that nourish critical analysis of recovered works.  Kirsch and Royster (2010) remind us that women historically and currently have used rhetoric and writing, as well as research and scholarship, as a “multilayered community building tool” (p. 662).  Almjeld, et al. (2016) further consider online scholarly journals such as Kairos as a model that “can promote accessibility for all ways of being” and to be “used as safe spaces for feminists to claim that title.” In dialogue with such scholarship, we further propose varied parts and organization of Scalar as a potentially feminist interface that enables feminist scholars to showcase a range of media in a variety of ways and to weave themselves into the text.  

Reflecting on Almjeld, et al.’s (2016) hope for online publications as a feminist course of action, we invite digital archivists to similarly use Scalar as a “space where feminist rhetorical principles can be enacted, celebrated, and made explicit.” Anthologies typically introduce the archived text by summarizing some key components of the writer’s biographical content.  As feminist scholars, it’s critical to consider what informs the recovered writers’ decisions regarding the thesis or purpose of their work. Because our individual positionalities and sociocultural contexts such as mainstream feminism guide our interpretation of recovered texts, we can gain insight into the rhetorical purpose and methodology of writing the text by exploring the writer’s positionality, in terms of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and the like. With the previously listed content types available, Scalar allows for a visual representation of the writer’s positionality, transferring digital function with traditional biographical information. 

Further, making careful design decisions can aid the process of feminist recovery toward liberatory practice. Rather than relying on a limited range of media and on patriarchal linear modes of thinking and representation, Scalar not only invites but prompts the anthologizer to experiment with varied content types and with unconventional and networked approaches to organizing the selections.  On Scalar, feminist recovery projects can circulate diverse texts and build upon past scholarship to continue the conversation around women’s writing history. Because the goal is no longer to simply recover but also to employ critical research skills to frame our understanding of recovered texts, the digital design functions on Scalar allow researchers to listen, inquire, and critically interpret recovered texts. This facilitates social circulation, which Kirsch and Royster (2010) ask us to think of in terms of creating connections between social circles of past, present, and future women, in terms of how they lived, worked, and traveled and how their rhetorical practices have been altered according to their relational contexts (p. 23). 

These diverse opportunities for content and organization enable the reader to engage in careful reading and create connections between texts or rhetors with ease.  The ability to draw on other recovery projects and collaborate on expanding the canon is an explicit design aspect of Scalar. To produce a more inclusive archival record, the scholar can place texts in conversation with past anthologies and databases, echoing Enoch and Ramírez's (2019) intention to look towards the growing body of scholarship within rhetorical studies, but also to scholarship outside the field with options like media links, notes, and widgets (p. 10).  Pages and Media created on Scalar open up possibilities of deepening one’s understanding of various cultures, social perspectives, temporal settings, and geographical places, transcending constrictions of print archival work through the screen. Arranging the parts in a web-like net (as revealed in visualizations) uncovers conversations between sources: writers’ locations, rhetorical strategies, writing styles, and time periods. In this way, as Wysocki and Jasken (2004) urge, we can "try to see the [interface] as describing not the border between computers and us but the border between us and us: The interface, screen or paper, is where we make ourselves visible to each other using the strategies available to us" (p. 45).