Scalar
As with Vectors, development of Scalar was shaped in direct dialogue with scholars who participated in a series of NEH workshops devoted to "Broadening the Digital Humanities" held between 2009 and 2011. During these workshops, Scalar designers and programmers worked directly with scholars to implement strategies to address immediate research goals, marking a sharp distinction with the development process for many tools that are created with abstract digital humanities applications in mind. Because of its connection to Vectors, many scholars come to Scalar expecting an authoring environment that approximates the richly designed user experience of a Vectors project. While Scalar allows significant "look-and-feel" customization via CSS (cascading style sheets) and its database structure supports externally authored user interfaces – see, for example, Loyer's Flash-based interface for Evan Bissell's civil rights history project “The Knotted Line” – the emphasis within the platform's native affordances remains on information architecture, rather than highly interactive or richly mediated user interfaces.
Scalar supports a variety of web-compatible digital files – images, audio, video, text – as well as the linear and non-linear organizational conventions of paths and tags, respectively. The database driving Scalar treats these components as equivalent and capable of existing in any designated relationship to any other element. In other words, the database does not rely on traditional hierarchies; each element in a project can be defined as having any kind of relationship to any other element. For example, authors may be familiar with the basic practice of annotating a video file with text or using tags to identify and retrieve elements of content. In Scalar, it’s possible to annotate a video with another video or create a tag that is a critical pathway unto itself. The creative potentials enabled by this type of flexibility in information architecture are best recognized in the reverse engineering of the critical processes it enables. That is, the affordances of Scalar’s flat database ontologies include the ability to ask different kinds of questions and respond with different kinds of answers. The real potential of Scalar is thus realized when it is used to rethink the potential structures of scholarly argumentation.
Historically there has been a divide between "close" and "distant" reading within humanities scholarship; with close textual analysis sometimes perceived as a casualty of the movement to computational analysis of large collections of media. Scalar was deliberately architected to support both types of analysis, inviting authors to consider not just one or the other but the relationship of part to whole. The platform offers built-in visualization tools for mapping the broad contours of an archive as well as tools for doing granular analysis at the level of commentaries attached to individual video frames or pixels in an image. Although Scalar downplays the importance of interface design in favor of a modest palette of design templates, I would argue that the potential for a rich user experience via the information architecture – that is, the defined relationships among elements in the database and potentially complex navigational structures – is no less compelling or intellectually generative.
