Unlike many digital tools and platforms we have used in the past (such as Wordpress or even Omeka), Scalar is notable for its support of richly collaborative projects with multiple authors and roles. There may be potentially limitless “official” contributors to a Scalar book, with various contributory roles, in addition to the active construction of meaning by general users. While we only used the Author role in our own project and can't speak to the nuances of the other designated roles and their functions, understanding the different options would have been helpful in supporting our collaborative authorship in Scalar. They highlight the ways Scalar can support feminist values of collaboration and social circulation, allowing and even encouraging creators to consider themselves as active contributors to feminist history in their design choices, and to imagine real audiences and users who will extend and elaborate that feminist network through their own interactions with the text. 

Different Types of Roles

Scalar offers several different types of roles for creator and contributors, including Authors, Commentators, Reviewer and Readers, each distinguished by their level of editing access within the book. Thus, the role of Author versus Reviewer might be understood as comparable to a traditional author and editor, where the Author can add and edit all materials, and the Reviewer can only comment or suggest changes to existing content. The Reviewer’s edits are not visible to end-users, who see only the final edited version. 

Other roles break from these more traditional print-based functions, allowing a layering effect of commentary beyond direct edits, which traditionally render multiple contributions invisible in the final text. For example, while the role of Commentators can be understood as limited in that Commentators can only edit existing pages, and any new pages they create are flagged as commentaries to end users, from another perspective, their role is simply different from that of Authors, marked by their ability to create a dialogic experience of reading and response that is preserved as part of the text for end users. Similarly, Readers can only add comments to existing content— a more circumscribed role, but one that also allows for enhanced reader engagement, and the layering of multiple readers’ experiences within the comments. 

Below you can find a video that provides an overview of the different user roles and visualizations of content, narrated by Amy Lueck.

All authors and other contributors must be registered through Scalar, having provided their name and contact to the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture and received a valid Registration Key, which are changed weekly for security. Once users are registered, they can be easily added or removed from projects. Administrators can also determine varying levels of authorial identification to end users, based on the project goal and context of production. For example, in the case of creating our project in the context of a course, we were able to use the “In Index” setting in the User dashboard to easily provide students with the option of being publicly listed as authors or not in the final book project.

We decided to assign every student to Author status so that we could continuously edit, add, delete, and save content. Because each student-author could make contributions iteratively and flexibly, we felt that Scalar aided our process of collaborative thinking and writing.