Tips
- Develop critical interface literacies. Read through print anthologies and other digital archival projects that feature women’s voices and to build “archival literacy,” considering how linear and non-linear organization structure plays a role in the readers’ understanding of the historiography of the writer (Enoch and VanHaitsma, 2015).
- Consider how the “politics of the interface” intersects with your own politics and goals for your project (Selfe and Selfe, 1994).
- Employ Kirsch and Royster’s (2010) call for “critical imagination, strategic contemplation, and social circulation” to understand your digital composing practice as a “lived process” of ongoing relationship with recovered work.
- Establish an intentional workflow and vision for the project at the outset, with opportunities for review and revision of that plan built in.
- Take advantage of the collaborative nature of the platform by reviewing what other authors are doing differently with the interface and reconsidering design possibilities.
- Map out paths before you start writing. Your paths can serve as an outline for the linear thread of your digital project, if you choose to feature one. Click through the book using the “Begin with…” and “Continue to…” buttons to catch any pages that act as a dead-end.
- Consider Scalar’s project-wide design features, such as page layout, splash images, and descriptions, that will streamline the look between the collaborative chapters.
- Connect your research and methodologies with Scalar’s functionality features, keeping in mind how the content will rhetorically flow according to the user.
- Consider the metadata that will be produced by your project, and you might use it to advance your projects’ goals. Attend to the metadata as content throughout the composing process, regularly reviewing the visualizations that are produced as a mode of invention.
- Be organized with tags. Keep an eye out for duplicates by creating a standard set of tags for all authors to adopt. Search for relevant pages to tag in the search bar.
- Consider how content might be composed to stand alone, allowing users to take advantage of the non-linear navigational possibilities without being disoriented.