Welcome
Scholars in rhetoric and composition have engaged 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. Less common within the field has been the use of Scalar — a flexible, dynamic digital platform for publishing digital "books." 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 technology for digital rhetorical work, specifically digital historiography and feminist recovery projects. We argue that Scalar is an under-utilized platform for feminist recovery projects, and one with the potential to better highlight the feminist values of interconnectivity, flattened hierarchies, and collaboration.
While our original project was based in the classroom, we approach it throughout 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 insights for other scholars interested in using Scalar for feminist recovery and other related projects.
In the affiliated pages and sections of this project, we explore key insights and experiences of engaging feminist rhetorical recovery in Scalar. Because many readers are not yet familiar with Scalar's interface, we begin here by introducing the reader to the basic navigational options for exploring this project, which are a key feature of the interface.
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 feminist recovery work. We then focus our discussion around the key consideration of project PARTS, which refers to options within Scalar for what kinds of media to include and how those options shape the work of recovery; PATHS, which focuses on the navigational options and how they inform decisions about content and argument; and PEOPLE, which highlights the ways Scalar structures 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. We close by providing final thoughts about digital feminist recovery work. Readers have the option to explore these materials in several ways. You can:
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 technology for digital rhetorical work, specifically digital historiography and feminist recovery projects. We argue that Scalar is an under-utilized platform for feminist recovery projects, and one with the potential to better highlight the feminist values of interconnectivity, flattened hierarchies, and collaboration.
While our original project was based in the classroom, we approach it throughout 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 insights for other scholars interested in using Scalar for feminist recovery and other related projects.
Navigation
In the affiliated pages and sections of this project, we explore key insights and experiences of engaging feminist rhetorical recovery in Scalar. Because many readers are not yet familiar with Scalar's interface, we begin here by introducing the reader to the basic navigational options for exploring this project, which are a key feature of the interface.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 feminist recovery work. We then focus our discussion around the key consideration of project PARTS, which refers to options within Scalar for what kinds of media to include and how those options shape the work of recovery; PATHS, which focuses on the navigational options and how they inform decisions about content and argument; and PEOPLE, which highlights the ways Scalar structures 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. We close by providing final thoughts about digital feminist recovery work. Readers have the option to explore these materials in several ways. You can:
- Reference the table of contents, which is visible at the bottom of this page and also accessible throughout the project by clicking on the icon with three horizontal lines 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 (based on basic design/functionality considerations within Scalar) 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.
- Use the directional icons at the bottom of each page to move sequentially through materials, similar to a traditional print article or book.
- 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. For example, in the above visualization, a user can observe non-linear interconnections between article contents, using the visualization as an illustration, and can also actually navigate the article using that interactive navigation, following connections or themes of most interest to them. We invite you to explore that visualization and the others embedded throughout the project to best understand the functionality offered by Scalar.