Welcome
Scholars in rhetoric and composition have engaged in a range of technologies and platforms to build digital archives and curate rhetorical histories as part of their research and teaching practices. The most popular platforms are probably Wordpress and Omeka, each of which lend themselves well to the creation of digital exhibits, even by those with limited coding knowledge. So far less common within the field has been the use of Scalar — a flexible, dynamic digital platform for publishing digital "books." However, that is changing, particularly as the interface is updated and made to be more adaptable for a variety of publishing contexts.
In an upper-division English course, Women Writers and Writing, at Santa Clara University in fall 2020, we used Scalar to develop an anthology of women writers and writing held in our university's archives. In this Inventio webtext (which is itself developed in Scalar), we use our own digital anthology project and our experience building it as an example to introduce Scalar as a platform for feminist historiography.
Drawing on a framework for feminist research developed by Jen Almjeld and her students, we argue that Scalar’s interface design, which emphasizes rich intertextuality, flattened hierarchies, and collaboration, has the potential to support feminist values such as validating diverse perspectives and challenging systems of power in feminist recovery projects. In this text, we highlight those resonances, while also exploring some of the limitations revealed by our own use of the platform for our webtexts, which certainly fall short of the ideals of both feminist historiography and the potential of Scalar’s interface in specific and meaningful ways.
While our original project was based in the classroom, we approach it throughout this text not as an instance of pedagogy but as a practice of collaborative feminist recovery. To this end, we refer throughout to the student-authors and highlight their labor and experiences as scholars working with this digital tool in order to reveal practical and theoretical insights for other scholars interested in using Scalar for feminist recovery and other related projects, inside or outside of the classroom (see Waite).
Structure and Navigation of this Webtext
Because many readers may not yet be familiar with Scalar's interface, which is an important part of our argument, we begin here by introducing the reader to the basic structure and navigational options for exploring this project, as flexible navigation is a key feature of the interface.
Structure
While Scalar is perhaps most notable for its potential to support non-linear arguments, we recommend the reader navigate this webtext sequentially, much like you would a traditional print article or book. Following the Introduction, which provides an overview of relevant feminist recovery scholarship and an introduction to Scalar in that context, we then introduce our own PROJECT, developed in Scalar in the context of an undergraduate English course dedicated to theorizing feminist recovery work. We then focus our discussion around the key consideration of project PARTS, which refers to digital media options within Scalar and how those options shape the work of recovery; PATHS, which focuses on navigational options and how they inform decisions about content and argument; and PEOPLE, which highlights the ways Scalar's structure supports and renders visible collaborative work on such digital projects. In each section, we introduce the relevant functionality of this platform from the perspective of a collaboratively authored feminist recovery project, including attention to both basic functionality questions and more theoretical insights. We do not discuss all functionality of Scalar, which is done ably in their User Guide, but instead, focus on the features we have experience using in our own project and the ways they are reflective of the feminist values in our own project. We close by providing final thoughts about digital feminist recovery work.
Navigation
Readers have the option to explore these materials in several ways:
- Use the directional icons at the bottom of each page to move sequentially through materials, similar to a traditional print article or book. Subpaths will take readers sequentially through the material before connecting back to the main Project, Parts, Paths, and People structure.
- You can also reference the table of contents, which is displayed at the bottom of this page and is also accessible at any point throughout the project by clicking on the hamburger icon in the upper left corner of the screen, to get a bird’s eye view of the article as a whole and jump to any section of interest. Again, the primary sections are Project, which discusses holistic considerations and includes our original project as a component; Parts, which highlights different media and content decisions; Paths, which focuses on navigational options; and People, which discusses the structures available for collaborative authorship. The sections need not be navigated sequentially, though the contents in subpaths within each section are best read in that order.
- Use the project visualizations included under the compass icon in the upper left corner of the screen to navigate through the content in a non-linear fashion as revealed through the paths, tags, or other visualization options. These visualizations are similar to the ones embedded throughout the text, such as the above visualization of non-linear interconnections between article contents. While we use these visualizations primarily for illustration throughout this text, Scalar is designed to enable users to navigate content interactively by following connections or themes of most interest to them. Though this webtext is structured linearly, we do invite readers to explore the visualizations embedded throughout the project and the additional visualizations generated by the interface as a means to explore the functionality offered by Scalar and reflect on the limitations of a linear document design in this context. Seeing what the visualizations reveal will help readers to imagine designs that best suit their own projects. For example, the visualization embedded below shows how our content in the following webtext is organized. Click on the circles to expand the network and explore titles of each page.