This platform permits editors to modify the contents of the journal into paths, tags, comments, annotations, notes, media links, hyperlinks, and visualizations, all of which foster in the audience distinct scales of relating with the subject matter. We are interested in unpacking the related aspects of the ballad (the papermaking, the printing and type-setting, the tune-searching, the ballad-writing, the woodcutting, its fleshly materiality), and these aspects represent their own scales. And Corinne Bancroft’s experiential study of the hands-on exercises we did represents another scale: the exploration of our explorations. Yet instead of these scales being digitally-based and facilitated by a technological apparatus, these scales revolve primarily around the historical, theoretical, and intellectual currents relevant to ballad-making and originate ultimately from our human analytical powers. The human scale is obviously of a different species from the machine scale. Nevertheless, these two kinds of scales, rather than diverge from, converge upon the theme of making. In as much as our analytical powers seek to reveal the several layers or scales of ballad-making, digital manipulation serves to structure our analytical revealing according to paths, tags, etc. The ballad is the culmination of various forms of making, our analyses of the ballad is a making of knowledge to be shared and passed on, and digital manipulation is the re-making and unmaking of our content into scales.

We find a continuity that runs from the object of study—the ballad—to the historical and theoretical analyses and finally to the structural and computational manipulation of our analyses. It is a continuity whose central element is making. We can think of making as scaling or recalibrating. The creation of something, it turns out, depends on deliberate acts of modification and adjustment. To create is not to make something ex nihilo, but it is to make something out of what already exists. Creation is the rescaling of the original into something adjusted, adapted, and augmented. What already exists, for us, is our analytical essays, and what we should do and will do is the tactical augmentation of our already existing essays into the scales of paths, tags, and so forth. In doing so, we remake as digital artisans the way our knowledge is presented. Scalar, in the end, makes analysts into architects. The tools of creation or tactical augmentation are undoubtedly Scalar’s preprogrammed functions. These functions, if you will permit me to make the allusion to Milton’s Paradise Lost, are “the golden Compasses, prepar’d / In Gods Eternal store, to circumscribe / This Universe, and all created things” (7.225-227). Our augmentations are the deus ex machina, the god from the “Eternal store” of the machine, that will rescue the ballad from the tragic drama of obscurity and cast it in the luminous beginnings of knowledge.

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