Parts: Both Form and Content
Types of Content
The main types of content within the interface are Pages and Media. Pages are basic rich text editing spaces, but Scalar's interface really encourages richly interconnected and embedded media and content within those pages. In fact, the content of specific pages can never really be thought of in isolation. Instead, decisions about content also entail decisions about intertextual relationships, design, and navigation. One such decision is whether to identify this content as a Path, Comment, Annotation, or Tag — each of which has the option to be either a direct or indirect object (ie, a page might be a path containing other elements, or might be contained by a path; it might be a comment or be commented on by something else; it might be annotation or be annotated by something else; it might be a tag, or might be tagged by something else). The interface also centers interconnection by providing many dynamic embedding options in their text editor, including Media Links, Notes, and Widgets, in addition to regular hyperlinks. By foregrounding these options, Pages implicate navigation decisions in what might otherwise seem to be more straightforward content decisions.
The second primary content type, which is not always usefully distinguished from Pages, is Media. Media can be an image, a video, a webpage, or even a fully embedded archive. What is also somewhat unique about Media within Scalar is that, rather than merely being embedded, each Media item is a Page of its own, and can be made a path, comment, annotation, or tag of any other page, or can be part of another path, commented on, annotated, or tagged by any other page. Conversely, a Page in Scalar can also be treated as a Media item and embedded using the above methods.
Finally, another notable form of content for us is the Visualizations produced by Scalar metadata. Beyond those visualizations that can be purposefully embedded within a page, there are visualizations available to all readers in the upper lefthand corner of the screen that are not controlled or curated by the authors. Reviewing these visualizations, though, shapes the way authors organize content, as they reveal unintended relationships and patterns in one's own work. For example, when we originally drafting this webtext for Kairos, we had embedded the entire anthology project within this webtext. However, reviewers quickly noticed that the visualizations were a mess as a result, combining keywords and tags from both projects in a chaotic and unhelpful way. Thus, the metadata content disrupted our assumptions about "content" altogether, providing opportunities for question-building, not for mapping static content and relations (Graban).
If you are overwhelmed by this array of content options and relationships, you are in good company. The important thing is to note the variety of content options and to think of the ways the parts of Scalar map onto the parts (both contents and intertextual connections) of our own recovery project. The video here provides an introduction to these different content types and where these options are located in the Scalar interface.