And, as a last reflection to put this report finally to an end, we ponder, “What do we as editors and architects do? What is the practice of which we should be aware?” There are many names (making, annotating, analyzing, visualizing, reducing, re-scaling, re-distancing, adjusting, deforming, unmaking, etc.) to describe our acts. Since these actions will transpire within the context of our collective effort to create a journal about ballad-making, let us call our effort a social one, and since our efforts are done ultimately through Scalar and more basically with a computer, let “social computing” be the general name we give to our endeavors. As Liu tells us, social computing can be generally defined as “ ‘the use of technology in networked communication systems by communities of people for one or more goals’” (par. 13).  Scalar does permit users and editors to do network communication in the sense that we editors will be sharing our essays with each other, uploading them to Scalar, annotating media files, and creating notes, Scalar links, tags, paths and thus finding interrelations among our essays—all of these operations involve us being connected via the network of the digital interface. What are the stakes of such socially networked computing? Liu suggests,

[I]t may be that experiencing and communicating literature through social-computing technologies will do more than supplement older reading, interpreting, and performing practices. The payoff will be an evolution in our understanding of the nature of reading, interpreting, and performing. When we “read” a Shakespeare play as a social-network diagram or a Chaucer poem as a blog, for instance, we expand or reconfigure the nature of reading. Reading overlaps with the actions of modeling, gaming, role-playing, adapting, translating, rendering, and simulating. With reference to Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann’s important essay “Deformance and Interpretation,” socially computed reading may even experimentally deform literature to discover new truths about the significance of literature. (par. 46)

Indeed, when we read about ballads through the social computing technologies of tags, paths, and visualizations, for instance, we can very well reformulate or confirm our assumptions about the ballad making process. In my case, reading about papermaking through visualizations, paths, or tags can lead to a knowledge of the network-like interrelations among, say, the techniques and stages of this manufacturing process. As I said before, Scalar makes visible the conceptual and argumentative connections of the content, so in this regard, Scalar already is conducive to the production of a network-related knowledge. In the same essay, Liu adds, “it may be that social computing will change the whole paradigm of literary reading and research to make central the social environment of literature” (par. 52). Obviously, ballads are social artifacts, and the social computing we do only reinforces and brings to sharper light the sociality of our literary object of study. At the same time, social computing enables us to be more mindful of the sociality of making. Creation is a communal activity, it seems to us, and if creation, as I said in another section, strives to augment and enhance pre-existing elements, then we social computing agents may hope to enlighten the already existing community of readers out there in the galactic Web.

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