Getting started

A new lens contains a single visualization menu and a single content selection menu. Making selections from those menus will open various modal windows as needed to configure the component. Next to those menus is a “plus” button which allows additional content selections, filters, and sorts to be added. Every time a change is made to the lens, its results are retrieved and displayed (the current result count is displayed in the top right corner).

Changing the lens title

You can directly edit the title of the lens in the editor.

Editing the lens expression

The expression is the set of rules that determine what content will be returned by the lens. It’s represented by a set of colored drop-down menus, each of which identifies a separate component of the expression.

Expression components

Visualization (purple)

A lens is a dynamic visualization, so every lens expression begins by indicating which Scalar visualization will be used to render the results returned by the lens.

Content selections (blue)

A visualization needs something to visualize, and so the next component of every lens expression is a selection of content from the current Scalar project. This is might be a set of specific, hand-picked items, a set of items with the same type, or a set of items geo-tagged within a certain distance of a particular location.

A lens can include more than one content selection, either returning the combined set of all of their results, or only the results that all of the selections have in common. As soon as a second content selection is added, a drop-down menu with both options (combination or intersection) appears at the top of the editor.

Filters (orange)

Each content selection can be modified with one or more optional filters. Content can be filtered by type, by text content, Scalar relationship, distance from a geotagged item, quantity, metadata content, and date last visited. Note that the relationship filter is the only one which can actually expand the content selection, by adding related items (for example, all of the items tagged or annotated by the original selection).

Sorts (green)

Sorts appear after all content selections — they determine the order of the complete set of content returned by the lens. Content can be sorted alphabetically by title, by creation or modification date, by distance from a location, by Scalar type, number of relationships, number of text matches, or by visit date.