Introduction
Scalar Vocabulary
Scalar was designed as a platform for scholarly publications, which means that using it is a lot more like using a digital book than using a typical website. In order to facilitate this kind of user experience the language of Scalar is slightly different from the ones you use either when you’re writing a book or you’re building a website. In order to understand how Scalar works, you need to know two basic pieces of vocabulary: page, path, and book.A page is the basic unit of Scalar’s information hierarchy. As with a typical website, you build pages to hold the information you want to keep on your site. But Scalar also stores the media you upload to your site and the metadata you use to describe that media on pages and uses pages to store the information hierarchies that Scalar calls paths.
A path is the name that Scalar has for various kinds of information hierarchies that are designed and organized by you. All paths are also pages, but not all pages are paths; you might say that paths are pages that store information about the organization of other pages within them. A typical way to use a path is like a chapter in a book, with each page being analogous to a section. We will discuss two similar but slightly different kind of paths during this workshop, but there are many other ways to utilize paths to organize and categorize the content of your site.
Book is the word the Scalar uses to describe what we would in other contexts call a site; in other words, your Scalar book is the whole of your Scalar project, including pages, paths, media, metadata, widgets, and whatever else you’ve used to build it, organized by you to be consumed by your audience.
Building Your Scalar Site
Building a successful Scalar site is as much about organizing your argument as it is about adding content. This quality provides a clear reason to include outlining as a step in the writing and revising process and makes Scalar an excellent platform for multimodal writing assignments that also build important skills for more traditional essay writing assignments. Accordingly, during this workshop, we, too, are going to follow an outline:- Pick a subject
- Brainstorm your site’s argument and organization
- Build your site’s pages
- Develop your site’s content
- Connect your pages into paths
1. Pick a Subject
In this workshop, you’re going to build a small Scalar project about an Austin landmark that you think is important or meaningful. It could be a tourist attraction (the statehouse, the stadium, Franklin’s), a place of more local interest (the moontowers or the Paramount, for example), or a place that’s particularly meaningful for you. Whatever place you chose, it should be somewhere well known enough that you can readily find relevant information and images online.2. Storyboard Your Site
Before we begin to get our hands dirty in Scalar, take out a pen and pencil and your notebook. As with writing an essay on a word processor, most effective approaches to building a Scalar book use a mix of analog and digital writing practices. If you’re doing a class project in Scalar, you might even wish to compose significant sections of your writing before you begin to plan your book. Today, however, we’re going to go straight from outlining to building your book; because Scalar pages are visual objects, and because part of this process is organizing those visual objects in sequence, we have chosen to describe this process as “storyboarding.”For this workshop, you should storyboard three pages; one with a short description of your landmark, one with a few sentences about why you selected that landmark (that is, why it is of historical, geographical, personal, etc. importance), and one where you’ll briefly describe the neighborhood around the landmark and put a map of the area. Take ten minutes now to do this.