Exploring Instructional Uses of Scalar at Illinois: Lessons for the Adoption of Digital Humanities Publishing Tools

Daniel G. TracyUniversity Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Question and MethodIn Fall 2013 the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) partnered with the University of Southern California to introduce the digital humanities publishing platform Scalar to the Illinois campus. The platform has had significant uptake on campus in a variety of departments—Illinois is reportedly the biggest Scalar partner—with support for users coming from IPRH, the library, and campus technology services. This poster focuses on uses of Scalar in classrooms at Illinois and the resulting pedagogical challenges and opportunities. Research Questions:• How can the use of Scalar on campus serve as an

exploratory case study in implementation of new digital humanities tools at research institutions?

• How were people using the tool? • What does and doesn’t work for users? • How could this information be used to shape

local support and inform best practices for new digital tool adoption?

 Methods:An initial survey, sent to participants in a variety of campus-wide Scalar workshops, gathered basic data. More detailed interviews, with some survey respondents and individuals offering support for use of Scalar on campus, provided extensive qualitative data. Analysis of related Scalar publications also helped clarify how it has been used. The focus of this poster is on key instructional issues from the interview data with teachers and others working with credit courses on Scalar projects.

About ScalarA product of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture at USC, Scalar is an open source platform for publishing media-rich content in non-linear “books.” Each book consists of individual pages that may be organized into discrete paths for users. Pages support integration of text with media, annotation of all media types, tagging, reader commenting, and other functions.

Sample Scalar books, instructions for creating books in Scalar, and account set-up can be found at http://scalar.usc.edu/.

AcknowledgmentsThank you to Kevin Hamilton at the IPRH for his assistance making connections with Scalar users in this study.

ConclusionsThe interviews produced several themes regardless of overall positive or negative experience. These themes raise significant issues for adoption of new digital publishing tools, Scalar especially.

Marketing

Interviewees almost universally mentioned the gap between the “super sexy” (in one person’s phrase) sample Scalar books used to market the tool and what was possible out of the box. There is a clear challenge for rolling out a tool in balancing the need to show its most exciting capabilities but not inflate expectations and create disillusionment. For Scalar, many users would be happier with the out-of-the-box functionality if they had it in mind from the start. Interface

There are clear challenges around what is otherwise a Scalar strength: support for multimedia. Students and instructors sometimes had trouble distinguishing upload/linking options or ran into frustration with the workflow of uploading and integrating media into pages.

Pedagogy

Scalar assumes a different approach to writing. Teaching writing strategies and how they might differ in different digital publishing environments up front may help students use the tool more successfully.

Takeaway

Scalar is an exciting tool for getting students to think about different ways to organize evidence. Instructors need to prepare to teach students an approach to writing in the tool, but also to address pain points as the tool continues to improve its interface.

Diverging Experiences,

Common Themes

“On the whole it works well if you don't have messianic

expectations about it. Obviously it's a good working tool for imagining things. It's

not the slickest GUI interface in the world but it's simple and it

works.”

An undergraduate history course had one of the more successful experiences with Scalar: once the class confronted the key issue of how pages, media objects, and paths related, students were able to fulfill the course goals of thinking about media more rigorously as evidence from a historical perspective. Challenges appeared more for course administration issues that Scalar doesn't support.

“Doing multiple sites actually the frustrations that they might have had the first time really seemed to exacerbate the second time

around….[But another class with only one project in Scalar:] They

loved Scalar. Their responses were I liked it. I think it let me do a lot of different things. So that was interesting to see how they

if they just had to do one focused project it went a lot better than

having to repeatedly use it.”

One instructor and librarian collaborated successfully using Scalar in three media studies course sections. In two sections of one course the librarian provided instruction on using Scalar; the other course was co-taught and involved two significant Scalar projects. While students found the interface clunky at times, the classes were generally successful getting students to think about publishing. A key pedagogical need was to provide "a clear incentivization as to why [students] should learn digital publishing," especially with a non-commercial product. Yet Scalar's novelty had a key benefit: the instructor "want[ed] to get them to think critically, which is a benefit of an unknown tool."

“There was this problem where the platform could not cope with

large quantities of image data....But secondarily because

the way one has to go about making in Scalar you have to think in your head two steps

ahead in order to produce the appropriate sorts of relationships between your content and other content…that was one problem

too many for my students. It was too complicated.”

The most frustrated instructor described an art history course where students were able to do few tasks successfully in Scalar beyond tagging content, and who overwhelming pointed to dropping Scalar as one thing they would change in the class in end-of-term feedback. For this instructor, the tool was too counterintuitive and not visually attractive enough for art students used to working with slick easy-to-use commercial products.

“…clearly from the first class people even had trouble signing into Scalar and for maybe two or three students that was a huge hurdle right away, I mean they

just sort of never went back….About halfway through the class it became clear that Scalar wasn't the best thing to start with. If you have a project that has already gone through some cooking, then you might think of using Scalar, but as an

info sandbox it wasn't designed to do what I thought it was

designed to do.”

The only graduate level course I discussed with an instructor was a course on feminism and technology. The instructor sought to "embed in the course the actual encounter with technology and…make that process part of the learning experience," but the experience had problems from the start despite relatively technically savvy students. The instructor suggested the problems included both significant technical difficulties and a pedagogical problem with assigning too many other technical platforms that had to be learned at the same time.

Sample path map of a Scalar book. Colin Gordon, Growing Apart: A Political Historyo f American Inequlity: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/growing-apart-a-political-history-of-american-inequality/indexThe book is one of the Showcase features on the Scalar website.

Screenshots of the toolbar and relationships sections of the Scalar composition screen. The relationships were cited by several participants as key to the learning curve. Integratingmedia (with the blue and grey buttons) produced the most frustration with the interface.

Scalar provides several built-in visualizations of the structure of books, including the radial display of relationships between all elements above and the path map below to the left. Thisradial display comes from the Scalar Showcase book by Sheryl E. Reiss, Exhibitions Close Up – Bernini: Sculpting in Clay. http://scalar.usc.edu/hc/caa.reviews-bernini/index