This page was created by Collin Hardwick.
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Scalar was created to allow authors to contextualize their research by organizing content through curated pathways (nonlinear, lateral, radial, etc.) as opposed to more traditional threads, such as chronological order.“If WordPress privileges hierarchy, Scalar prefers immanence. Scalar might be thought of as a speculative remapping of rigidly logical structures toward more conceptual ones, creating possibilities for many-to-many relations of diverse and varied kind, both human and machinic. If the Latourian litany is a flat list, a string of seperate, self-contained things, the flatness of Scalar operates differently through its insistence on context and relation” (McPherson 223).
Scalar’s explicit use of the “pathways” metaphor makes for a compelling invitation to apply Michel de Certeau's rhetoric of the walking from The Practice of Everyday Life. Given the platforms theoretical foundation, Scalar can reinforce the relationship between writing and space, encouraging writers and readers to interact with a digital place. De Certeau correlates this sort of interactivity and resistance. For him, “The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities within them” (de Certeau 101). For de Certeau, walkers become co-creators of a space, a liberatory aspect of a place.
What I am suggesting is that we can structure digital composition in such a way as to invite these “shadows and ambiguities.” Through platforms like Scalar, geographic contextualization can move beyond the naming our origins, disclosing where we are writing from. While, this is, of course, an important practice, I suggest that we can learn from other textual forms, like gaming and mapping, to create a uniquely geographic scholarship, where the very structure of our compositions reflect land, and embed our work with in a place, to the point where the work is imbued with place-ness.
