Composing Collaborative Feminist Recovery Projects with Scalar

People: Making Collaboration Visible

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, Gesa Kirsch and Jacqueline Jones Royster, and others have articulated, collaboration is a feminist praxis and value. Others in Digital Humanities, like Coker and Ozmet, Griffin and Hayler, and Rivard et al, have extended this observation particularly to digital work, where it is even more often the case that multiple people, even very large project teams, come together to produce projects. We followed Lindal Buchanan's 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" (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).

We responded especially to Patricia Fancher’s “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.
 


 

Going beyond the ability to see or even access one another’s work, though, what makes Scalar unique is the way the platform actually almost insists on collaboration and cross-content connections. That is, because of the paths and tagging features mentioned above, authors needed to think of how their own contribution intersected with the topics and themes explored elsewhere in the volume. The architecture of the digital volume requires this kind of consideration. 

The result for us was a deeply interconnected, populated volume that reflects what digital historian William G. Thomas III explains as a particularly unique quality of digital historiography-- its ability to “pull readers in less by force of linear argument than by the experience of total immersion” (Thomas). For us, part of that argument is an immersion in the labor of recovery as enacted by the student-authors involved. Enoch and Bessette highlight how these effects speak to feminist interests in affect, particularly Rosyter’s “passionate attachments”, which we must consider in terms of both our attachment to our subjects of study, but also our audience’s subsequent experiences of attachment. They caution us to "[explore] critically and carefully the affective dimension of digital historiography” (652). For our project, this speaks to both affective responses to our historical contents and to our own identities and experiences as feminist rhetoricians engaging this work. 

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