Revolutions of Historical Processes
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.