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Material Culture

Annie's Final Thoughts

I believe that Scalar has potential as a platform for medium-sized DH projects. In measuring Scalar's effectiveness in DH scholarship, the amount of data being shared should be considered. The data set that I used was on the smaller side, and was actually probably too small to make use of Scalar's many features. If I had been trying to form a coherent presentation instead of showing off the features of this tool, I don't think that Scalar would have been the right choice. At the same time, it would be easy to overwhelm either the users or the creators if the data set or project base was too broad. Scalar would not be a suitable platform for, say, the William Blake Archive or another massive DH project. Scalar boasts flexibility and freedom, but creators would need to devote massive amounts of time to coding and customizing each page of the book if they wanted to utilize one of Scalar's most prominent features: nonlinear branching. Just looking into branching for the twenty or so pages in my book was a headache. I cant' imagine what it would have been like to work with a hundred pages or more.

Pros:

Flexible design and customization (to a point)
Different media types and layouts are supported
The basics are easy to self-teach, and it seems like the majority of users only utilize the basics
The platform/site are updated frequently

Cons:

Basic coding is almost a necessity (this goes back to design and customization-it's almost impossible without at least a some knowledge of html/CSS)
There isn't as much default customization as, say, Wordpress or other, more well-known platforms and sites (for those who don't know code)
More complicated techniques are learned solely through trial and error
Large amounts of data are difficult to handle and manage, both from the creator's and users' standpoint
Branching paths are great in theory, but difficult to deal with in large numbers

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