People: Multiple Users, Multiple Roles
Different Types of Roles
Scalar offers several different types of roles, 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 edit 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 not limited but instead merely 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.
User Accessibility
Users 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. So, in the case of creating this work within 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 listed as authors or not in the final book project.