In the context of an upper-division English course, Women Writers and Writing, at Santa Clara University in fall 2020, the professor and approximately 25 student-authors examined the ways variously positioned women used writing to accomplish individual, interpersonal, and civic goals in their lives. The group worked as feminist rhetorical scholars recovering women writers and writing held within our university’s Archives & Special Collections and curating them in a born-digital anthology in Scalar. Our project aligns with other online database projects from scholars in both rhetoric and literary studies in its investment in recovery, its utilization of digital tools to support this effort, and its utilization of the classroom as a crucial space for engaging and supporting recovery work (see Gaul; Hayden). Speaking to the scholarly context of feminist rhetorical recovery, our goal throughout our digital anthologization process was to create our an(ti)thology as not just what Sarah Noble Frank calls a "constative" articulation of feminist representational possibilities but also a "performative" institution of those possible representations (Frank). That is, to feature not a rhetorical history as such, but an interactive engagement with the process of recovery and historiography that moves towards what Frank calls feminist historiography as if. 

Drawing only from the holdings of our own Archives and Special Collections, we tried to enact such a performative representation of feminist literary and cultural history by drawing from a purposely circumscribed set of texts to make a sort of literary-critical anti-anthology that draws attention to its choices and its positionality and makes our own process and reflections a key element of the anthology itself (Kirsch and Royster). Using a digital platform to enact this project, we hoped to contribute to a process of recovery as enacted and actively engaged by a community within and outside the field, building a diverse community of writers that included our authors, our audiences, and ourselves.

Virtual Proximity to the Archives

Because we were not able to interact with any of the archival materials in person during COVID, we found that using such a digital database platform was especially essential to our work. This platform allowed for a sense of what Janine Solberg calls “virtual proximity”, or “the sense of virtual “nearness” to sources or ideas—particularly as that nearness is enabled by organization, search, and retrieval technologies" (Solberg 68). We found, in line with Enoch and Bessette, that “A sense of virtual proximity thus creates new opportunities for strategic contemplation, as it occasions feminist historiographers to meditate on the ways digital searching aggregates materials, brings disparate information together, and prompts connections we may not have made before (641). Engaging an archival recovery project in the context of a global pandemic brought this concept to life for us. We saw how virtual proximity helped us transcend time-space and see ourselves as connected to our authors and to one another, and to do so in ways that did not erase our distance or difference either. This was particularly enabled by the Scalar platform, which offered visualization options that encouraged us to include additional metadata related to location and time of our authors' productions and our own recovery work in order to utilize that additional functionality of the platform. By encouraging attention to space and time in its visualizations, discussions of our own physical, temporal location became an active part of what we considered about our positionality as authors and editors, informing our scholarly approaches and insights.

By producing our an(ti)thology, too, we created the possibility for others to experience a "virtual proximity" to these authors and writings by increasing "the potential to find or encounter a source through the use of finding aids, search technologies, metadata, and similar mechanisms," making them more visible and therefore more "proximate" (Solberg 68). This ability to highlight and extend networks of participation and interconnection between and among diverse and distanced feminists is a crucial affordance of Scalar for feminist recovery projects. 

In what follows, we provide an overview of our own Scalar project and a link for readers to review it in its entirety. We discuss project-level planning and design considerations, including reflections on the process. The video below begins by providing an introduction to some of the basic functionality of Scalar at a project level, including a view of the dashboard on the backend of the Scalar platform in our sample project.