It was important to us to involve multiple authors in the creation of our text, and also to make that work visible for users. As scholars like Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford (2001), Gesa Kirsch and Jacqueline Jones Royster (2010), and others have articulated, collaboration is a feminist praxis and value. Others in Digital Humanities, like Mary Catherine Coker and Kate Ozmet (2019), Gabrielle Griffin and Matthew Hayler (2018), and Courtney Rivard, Taylor Arnold, and Lauren Tilton (2019), have extended this observation, particularly to digital work, where it is even more commonly the case that multiple people, even very large project teams, come together to produce projects. We followed Lindal Buchanan's (2003) definition of collaboration as "a cooperative endeavor involving two or more people that results in a rhetorical product, performance, or event," which she emphasizes "considers process as much as product, examining the shared social and rhetorical practices that produce such discursive outcomes as books and articles, speeches and sermons, petition drives and conventions" (p. 134). 

As a collaborative feminist webtext, the labor we each contributed and the "social circulation" of our recovered texts and research processes were key ideas we sought to engage and represent (Kirsch and Royster, 2010).

In addition to collaboration and formal contribution, a key consideration of the role of “people” in a Scalar project is the ability to reveal contributors and users as real (embodied, positioned) people. We responded especially to Patricia Fancher's (2017) “Technofeminist Design,” which explores the visual and affective connections between our embodied selves as authors, to which we responded by making our physical images and reflections a major component of our recovery work. Throughout the project, we sought similar ways to make visible our own intellectual and embodied contributions to this work, in order to implicate ourselves in a feminist network that we were simultaneously documenting and participating in. 

Scalar made this work possible by providing various visualization tools that allowed us to emplace ourselves alongside our authors in spatio-temporal feminist contexts. For example, having entered geospatial metadata for our individual reflections, Scalar allowed us to generate and embed a map visualizing our connections to one another, below. The attention to embodiment and positionality “giv[es] voice to participants and validates their experiences” (Almjeld et al., 2016) In the context of feminist recovery, those participants include archival subjects as well as contemporary researchers, readers, and other interested parties. The specific commitment to giving voice to and validating archival subjects is already well established among feminist archival researchers (Heidi McKee and James Porter 2012). Encouraging users to locate content and contributions on a map insists on a sense of positionality that “honor[s] the personal and political" (Almjeld et al., 2016). By placing themselves on the map, student-authors then applied this understanding to themselves as well, seeing the distance and proximity between and among themselves–a particular challenge in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that was underway during student-authors composing. This global sense of socio-historical positionality is an important feminist value (Wang, 2012; Wu, 2005; Kirsch and Royster, 2010).)

Another aspect of collaboration and contribution that marks Scalar as notably feminist is its approachability for technologists of varying levels of experience. While some experience with digital media and basic coding knowledge is certainly helpful to any new technology adoption, deep technical expertise should not be necessary for using Scalar, making it ideal for adoption by feminist rhetoricians who might not (yet) consider themselves multimodal scholars. We consider this to be an empowering aspect of the platform, inviting a range of feminist scholars into such multimodal work. Student-authors were empowered to contribute to the work of technofeminist recovery regardless of their previous experience or expertise with technology.