What are some of the directed operations that our readers end up performing? To answer this, let’s return, for a moment, to the subject of tags. Tags, as opposed to paths, offer a reading experience that sharply differs from the reading experience of a path: tags give rise to an informal, free-form, and casual reading experience, whereas paths mold a more predetermined, directed, regulated one. This is not to suggest that the latter kind is to be valued less. Paths and tags each have their benefits and boons, and they promote experiences that come to complement, rather than clash with, each other, granting the audience a balanced and rounded engagement. Tags offer audiences an alternative from the path system and vice-versa. Creating a journal that induces these alternative experiences, overall, is a good thing, and striking the right balance between our paths and tags should become one of our objectives.

What’s important to take into account is that the journal editor and/or authors must determine the reading strategies that our audience is meant to follow. Readers do not create their own paths. Rather, the editor or users of Scalar create the paths and thus determine how readers should engage the journal. In the home page (as I did for this report), we could outline the different reading strategies possible in the journal.

Paths can be organized according to essays, themes, related topics, ideas, or other interconnecting elements among the essays. Paths guide readers into focusing on different emphases. Well-conceived and cleverly-crafted paths, thus, afford readers with a reading experience very different from and perhaps more dynamic than the experience of a regular paper journal edition.

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