Platform Adoption
A small body of literature exists about Scalar. Some publications review the platform's various features, either singularly (Fenton) or in comparison to other platforms (Roman). Other publications concerned more widely with innovative academic publishing tools do not have full reviews but mention Scalar in passing (Davis et al., Dombrowski, Drucker, Green, Jones, Miller et al., and Morgan). Existing empirical studies of Scalar have been done within the context of digital pedagogy. Daniel G. Tracy and Elizabeth Massa Hoiem monitored students during a tutorial-based Scalar course in which students made both an individual and collaborative book project on Scalar. Scalar's learning curve was a main issue, but students successfully experimented with Scalar's features both on their own and as a group. In a separate study, Daniel G. Tracy follows faculty, staff, and graduate students about the benefits and challenges of incorporating Scalar in teaching. His article focused on platform usability and its intersection with writing expectations. Although several design and conceptual issues came up, Scalar was often regarded primarily as a gateway into digital publishing. Anita Say Chan and Harriett Green's study, again within digital pedagogy, combined Scalar with Easel.ly and Voyant visualization to layer various digital tools in coursework.
The platform choice and adoption present in existing literature also came up during the traversal and interview with Dene Grigar. Due to its use of video material, Pathfinders needed to be a born-digital publication. Grigar explains that a reason they chose Scalar was because it comes from a good university with good funding. When asked, librarian Rachel Di Cresce puts the longevity of a platform into perspective. Although it helps that a book is not on a proprietary platform or in a unique format, she points out that platforms "come and go every ten years" and therefore it cannot relieve the "technical debt" of acquiring born-digital books. She explains that, as a librarian, she wants to be able to get digital publications down to their basic file form to ensure they can continue to exist without too much intervention. Grigar explains there were some setbacks with the software updates of Scalar, which led to repeating work when Scalar was in the process of releasing Scalar 2.0. Ultimately, however, Scalar 2.0 had more functionalities than the first edition, the most important of which, to Grigar, is that fact that it is responsive. In addition to this technical improvement that invites readership, Di Cresce also adds that libraries can play a role in making works known through course lists, LibGuides and exhibitions.
Grigar also considers it a relatively intuitive platform, but now has trained Kathleen Zoller on her team to create the Scalar books. As a self-identified "metadata freak", Grigar appreciates Scalar's functionality to create URLs for each media item which includes lots of metadata and is findable on Google search, even though it takes a lot of time to produce those pages. A drawback was that she did not like any templates, so Will Luers was hired to design the book in CSS. A similar issue also came up in Tracy's study, as participants were disappointed that the out-of-the-box systems did not look as nice as the customized demo books. For reference, the present article does not have any custom CSS or JavaScript. You are reading on the out-of-the-box system, with the simple addition of the 'background' image you see at both sides of the page. This geometric design matches the background of the video thumbnails to create coherence within the article's design. Design is certainly an important element of a platform, as Grigar notes that a thing she and co-author Moulthroup liked about Scalar is "the way it looked bookish, we wanted it to be scholarly".
Bookishness
Although not a "fetishized focus on textuality and the book-bound reading object" as Pressman defined "bookishness", Pathfinders does remediate the physical book. As such, Pathfinders does contribute to "rethink[ing] the ways in which we relate to books as objects and media forms" (Pressman). This interpretation of bookishness is immediately clear in a media/textual analysis of the work. Despite the absence of "firm paratextual policies" in born-digital works (Desrochers and Tomaszek), the paratextual elements that are part of the book itself, termed "peritext" by Gerard Genette, emulate characteristics of a physical book. The book has a front page which one could compare with a book cover. The reader is then prompted to "Begin with 'Title Page'", which shows a familiar title page with all the elements you would expect on a title page, such as authors, publishers, date of publication and an ISBN. The path continues with a dedication page and then the Introduction. Starting at the introduction, the digital nature becomes clear with a video introduction to the project as well as a written introduction underneath. The introduction already includes various links to other pages and media and ends with a table of contents that gives the option to begin a new path about Pathfinders or to start with the first electronic literature work in the book, "Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger". Of course, the reader is not limited to these options, as a button in the top left corner of the website reveals the full table of contents of the book including all the works and subsections. Moreover, the Scalar search field indicates "Search this book…", which led reader participant Lisa van Vark to remark "It's nice that they call it a book". Van Vark has significant troubles navigating the work at first, referring to the book as "a maze" and exclaiming that "there are so many options", which reflects earlier findings about Scalar's initial learning curve. Van Vark is brought around, however, by the visualization tool. She reads the instructions and understands how the nodes relate to the pages she has visited. Still seeing it as a literal navigation, she explains that the tool helps her "visualize it, literally, to see where you are". The features of Pathfinders are adoptions of the Scalar format. To readers unfamiliar with Scalar books, the differentiation between Scalar and its use by specific authors can be difficult. During the interview, Van Vark inaccurately considered the visualizations as part of Pathfinders specifically rather than the structure of Scalar, noting that she regarded Scalar in metaphorical sense as "the paper that the book was printed on". She further relates Pathfinders to physical books by saying that having the annotation and comment functions "brings the world … brings the context around the book into the book itself". Rather than a custom-made platform, Pathfinders' use of Scalar's features can serve as a blueprint for other research projects and other fields as well.Deciding to write the present article using Scalar, then, was also a point of reflection. Do I want to risk the 'technical debt' that Di Cresce mentioned, in which software updates will inevitably bring about more work for the editors of the journal in the long-term? What features of Scalar will be key in the composition of the article? How familiar will my readers be with other Scalar books: will their prior experience ground them while reading this article, or alternatively, will the - to them - unfamiliar format aid reflection on the platform? The adoption of platform then, is essential for practical reasons on the levels of production, textual, and readership, but how is it regarded by the academic community?
