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Speaking Back to the Speaker Ban: Oral History Practice And Free Speech Activism

Connection Visualization, Democratic Structures

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Great Work I'm Also Looking forward to start my new architecture project
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Great Work I'm Also Looking forward to start my new architecture project
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Revolutions of Historical Processes When I began exploring Scalar, I was initially unimpressed by The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture’s (ANVC) assertion that in Scalar, “Anything can do anything to anything.” My thought was that the phrase, needlessly repeated throughout instructions for how to maneuver the structure of their digital platform, was a banality that veiled an uncomfortable reality about the innovations of this publishing platform. One goal of Scalar is to give “authors tools to structure essay- and book-length works in ways that take advantage of the unique capabilities of digital writing, including nested, recursive, and non-linear formats.” In that, Scalar still privileges the structure of the book, providing a table of contents and index and requiring that authors (not makers, or creators) set up a linear pathway for their users to navigate before being able to create “nested, recursive, and non-linear formats.”^[1] If the aim of the ANVC is to have their users understand “the relationship of scholarly analysis to emerging digital typologies or genres,” their maintenance of a book’s structure as primary is rather regressive.^[2]

This was and is still disappointing to me. I had hoped to find a publishing platform that offered similar progressive possibilities in digital scholarship as my interviewees had offered in sharing their experiences in campus activism. One goal in using Scalar as a form for this project was to find a publishing platform that could echo the way in which stories are told in an oral history interview. As I experimented with Scalar, I asked myself: Will I be allowed to meander? Can I forget my original purpose, return to it pages later? Can I visually describe a moment and reflect on that moment simultaneously? Can this form sustain a narrative without a conclusion? Does this support or convey silences, reticences? What about a rush of feeling, the joy of telling a story well? Does this allow for historical processes to be explored at the same time as the product I am making? The answer to all of these is: maybe.

The idea that “anything can do anything to anything” might be true, offering the digitally democratic prospect that a page of text can be equal to an image or an audio annotation. In the backend of Scalar, there is a vast mass of “pages,” which includes pages of text (as you see here), as well as all media, annotations of that media, and tags. This makes the backend somewhat unruly to maneuver through, but simultaneously presents the thrilling possibility that linear text-driven narratives are already in a precarious position in the arena of digital publishing. In Scalar, the ANVC offers, “not only can any piece of Scalar content become a path or tag (or both), but it can also reference any other piece of content: text, video, audio, imagery—making it possible to build images that link to sequences of videos, audio files that group together related texts, or just about anything else you can think of.” Implied in this list of example structures of form is another uncomfortable reality: if everything is equivalent in the backend of this tool, the author is wholly responsible for creating the hierarchy of movement through the project. So much for the progressive possibilities of a publishing platform that can echo the structures of oral history, or, for that matter, the structures of historical processes, always, for me, a wandering, sometimes even fractious experience, but always one that is stratified.^[3]

But working with this platform still feels clumsy, even perhaps crude at times. It is easy to click to move forward, but I have prescribed your movement through this project, a power dynamic I am unsettled by, because, in part, the goal of this project is to allow for the user to experience the historian’s process. Despite all this, I still find Scalar exciting, and it remains for me an open invitation to assemble my experience through a series of encounters with the different pages, paths, tags, and annotations where processes and narratives await to unfold in multiple directions. Even if I am required to create a linear path first, that path can be amplified, allowing for a multi-linearity in structure that is rare even in digital publishing. This experiment in using Scalar might have failed, but it has done so productively.
[1] The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, Flexible Structure, Scalar, April 13, 2016.
[2] The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, About the Alliance, April 13, 2016.
[3] The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, Flexible Structure, Scalar, April 13, 2016.