Crimson Peak and The Representation of Women

Reflection on Platform

Scalar is a good platform, but I do not think it was the best platform for this project. Someone who is a sculptor, who knows clay in and out, knows the sharpness of their tools and the firmness of their own hands might not be able to do much if you gave them a block of suet and told them to go to work. I still haven't grasped Scalar as well as I could. With digital programs performance isn't just a matter of a user being able to figure things out, but also the user's familiarity with a program. Familiarity allows an author to work faster, more smoothly, and therefore become less frustrated with the medium. Using Scalar was difficult for me not because it is unworkable but because it is still foreign to me.

Over all the main issue was that I had an "essay" in mind and wrote on Word processor first before moving the text over to Scalar and uploading media. In this way Scalar did not particularly shape the writing process. Instead I took my idea of what Scalar should do and what I wanted my essay to look like and tried to splice the two together.

Considering how gif heavy this project became another platform, one that would allow mass-uploading, or better yet, one that supports copy-pasted gif urls, would have saved me a lot of time and management issues. A platform that could support minimum video clips of one minute would have also been ideal.
I attempted to host longer clips on Youtube and insert them onto Scalar. Like gifs the video URL had to uploaded as an "Internet Media File". I chose Youtube to host my videos because I am familiar with it. That said, with Youtube came inevitable copy-right issues and I nervously await the news that my videos there have been blocked.

My further problem with Scalar is visuals: even small gifs could not be lined up next to each other in rows, nor for some reason, would my text ever wrap around my gifs and videos, even though I know this platform is designed to do that. Instead all my items are arranged vertically. As someone more used to Tumblr's tidy gifsets ​ I found Scalar's inability to line gifs up frustrating.  I also disliked the inability to edit them or other media: if you changed your mind about a setting, say whether  it was "small" or "medium", you'd have to delete the entire thing and re-insert it, often accidentally deleting other media beside your target. In these ways simply putting media onto to Scalar has been very time consuming.

Overall, I think Scalar is a good platform; there are many tools and there's definitely an emphasis on organizational options, from the paths, to the layout forms, the multitude of archive options etc., but I don't think those aspects were beneficial to my project, nor do I think Scalar supports the visual nature of my project as I intended it. 

 

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