Welcome!
Scalar is an online publishing platform designed for long-form, media-rich writing; “media-rich digital scholarship” is the term used by the group that built Scalar, The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). The platform was built to serve scholars working on non-traditional book-length projects, especially projects with a strong visual or media culture aspect, but I’d argue that it’s also a very powerful teaching tool because of its unique approach to online authoring.
The basic unit of content in Scalar is called a page. When you’re creating a Scalar page, you name the page in a title box, you describe it in another text box, and you write and format the main content of the page in a text entry box. You can choose from a number of layout options for this basic page. You can integrate media into the page, you can enter metadata about the page and its contents, and you can add annotations and comments. These are features shared by any number of writing-based online platforms. However, this is just the beginning of Scalar's capabilities.
Once you’ve created pages in Scalar, you can start building routes through those pages in two ways. You can attach tags, which group pages together in a non-linear cluster, or you can make what Scalar calls a path, which is a more linear, step-by-step progression through your material. You can be very creative with these paths. You can create complex branching paths, you can create paths that loop back on themselves, you can create rabbit-hole paths. This is where the magic of Scalar’s so-called “flat” architecture starts to become apparent. The name Scalar is a reference to a pair of terms commonly used in math and physics to describe motion: scalars and vectors. Vectors are quantities with magnitude and direction, while scalars are quantities that have magnitude only--no direction. So Scalar, the publishing platform, does not dictate the direction of relationships between your pieces of content. You have an enormous amount of control over the organizational shape your material takes via these tags or paths.
Furthermore, when you create tags, comments, and annotations, each of these pieces of content exist as individual pages themselves. A tag is a page that itself can be tagged. A comment is a page, a path is a page, an annotation is a page. Any piece of content in Scalar can be given any kind of relationship in Scalar. The platform itself does not limit what function a tag or a comment or a path can have in your work. You can mix and match and remix and rematch all of the bits of context you create in Scalar. This radically non-hierarchical structure of Scalar makes the platform a very useful tool for teaching, especially in writing-intensive disciplines that ask students to demonstrate their thinking and learning through writing. Scalar makes visible a lot of the process of thinking and writing that is often invisible to students.
Scalar's Pedagogical Features
- emphasizes the PROCESS of writing and knowledge creation.
- foregrounds the MAKING inherent in writing.
- foregrounds the REVISION process to show writing as REITERATIVE, UNFINISHED.
- encourages understanding of writing process as MODULAR or done in small bits and built up from there.
- VISUALIZES connections between pieces of content.
- makes work of students VISIBLE to one another.
- makes instructor's work VISIBLE.
- makes writing available for REMIX and REUSE.
- makes the technical aspects of word processing VISIBLE.
- demonstrates the COMMUNAL aspect of knowledge creation.
- foregrounds LABOR involves in making things, including internet writing.
- engenders STUDENT AGENCY and CHOICE.
- foregrounds issues of PUBLIC vs PRIVATE writing by highlighting technological issues related to generating, sharing, and archiving discursive culture.
Scalar's Technical Features
- Page
- Media Item
- Tag
- Path
- Annotation
- Comment
- Scalar Note
- Media Gallery
- Visualization tools
- Timeline
- Map
- Metadata
- iFrame
- Hypothes.is
- Time stamps
- Saved versions
- Multiple authors/collaborators
- Critical Commons
Scalar's Archive + Library Partners
- Critical Commons
- The Getty Library
- Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library + the NYU Libraries
- Internet Archive
- Shoah Visual History Archive
This page has paths:
- Introduction to Scalar Fiona Coll