In as much as this quantification exercise lets us prophetically scale the size of our publication, it also leads us to question the “book” element of our Scalar book. What does it mean that this "book" can be quantified? And what is the significance of the "pages" of this "book" being anywhere from a Note, media file, to a path sequence? I have used “book” at various points in this report, and I used that term loosely. It is generally thought that a book is something long in its breadth and bounded as a whole, yet, as I already discussed, Scalar through the paths function unbinds the long-form original into short-form segments. As Alan Liu himself eloquently puts it,

[T]he digital makes large forms in general go away. This is because the digital subordinates books, films, music, and anything else to a focus on documents (or, equivalently, files). Once we wrote or read books, stories, and poems, that is, but today—no matter the genre—everyone just writes and reads documents. What’s a document?... Documents are deformational forms…because they atomize molar structures into modular, remixable components geared to industrial efficiency and postindustrial flexibility. From the invention of the vertical file and Frederick Winslow Taylor’s work-process forms to today’s computer files and folders, the document is of a piece with the great digital dissolve that now unbundles such aggregated forms as albums, shows, and books into tracks, clips, samples, and other modular ejecta perfect for such reaggregators as iTunes or Google.

Setting aside Liu’s provocative allusion to “postindustrial flexibility,” we find that the Scalar journal we hope to create is truly a “deformational” opus. From the digital unmaking of long forms into “modular, remixable components,” our journal emerges. En masse, our journal-to-be is an aggregate of multiple interrelated and quantifiable parts that in theory can be further “atomized” and deformed. In this sense, our digital documents, files, and pages are protean. The protean nature of the digital materials corresponds quite nicely with the protean nature of one’s experiences of these materials. By engaging a journal refracted and reformed into the particularities of paths, readers entertain manifold perspectives and glean a work of prismatic proportions.

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