Genre-bending on an Academic Platform: Three Creative Works on Scalar

Hannah Ackermans Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies University of Bergen, Norway hannah.ackermans@uib.no

Abstract

This paper investigates genre and media specificity of electronic literature created in Scalar. Scalar is a platform and authoring tool created specifically for humanities scholars to enable multimodal and multilinear publications. Besides scholarly work, Robert Budac’s The Scalar Conspiracy [4], Steven Wingate’s daddylabyrinth: a digital lyric memoir [12] and micha cárdenas’ Redshift & Portalmetal [5] are all works of electronic literature created in Scalar. I demonstrate that all three of these works use Scalar to create genre-bending texts that build on and subvert the technological affordances as well as the contextual connotations that Scalar provides. The Scalar Conspiracy parodies the counter- intuitive user interface elements by making the reader investigate the text’s different hidden messages. daddylabyrinth: a digital lyric memoir destabilizes the genre of the (auto)biography by promoting documentation and research while continuously showing how these processes fall short during the writing and reading process. Redshift & Portalmetal favors experience over documentation to create a work that is both immersive and theory-building. These Scalar fictions are characterized by the premise that the platform’s academic context strengthens the narrative. Researching the multimodality and academic context as integral parts of the narrative structure opens up the opportunity to reckon with the platform-specificity across genres.

CCS Concepts

• Information systems – World Wide Web • Applied Computing – Arts and humanities – Media Arts • Human-centered computing – Hypertext/hypermedia and Web-based interaction

Keywords

Scalar, multimodality, multilinearity, electronic literature, genre, academic platform.

ACM Reference Format

Hannah Ackermans. 2021. Genre-Bending on an Academic Platform: Three Creative Works on Scalar. In Proceedings of 2021 ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT '21), August 30–September 2, 2021, Virtual Event, Ireland. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3465336.3475099

1 Introduction

An interplanetary climate-fiction work narrated by a trans woman of color, a memoir of a man uncovering and reckoning with the memory and legacy of his father, and a student’s parody of an assignment. What do all these have in common? The works I am referring to are all works of electronic literature created in the academic authoring tool Scalar. Within my research project on the digital practices in the academic field of electronic literature, I investigate the influence of the interfaces with which we encounter and shape our knowledge production. Scalar’s production and use as an academic platform is a prime example. Yet these creative works - micha cárdenas’ Redshift & Portalmetal [5], Steven Wingate’s daddylabyrinth: a digital lyric memoir [12] and Robert Budac’s The Scalar Conspiracy [4] - are far from the work originally envisioned by Scalar. As electronic literature is a highly hybrid field where art and research entangles, it is necessary to consider these creative works within the context of academic born-digital publication. Considering the works from the perspective of genre allows me to uncover the practical and associative links of the creative works to their academic platform. My earlier research shows that creative database narratives [1] instantiate a modeling practice of the characteristics and issues around academic databases. Similarly, I close read my present cases specifically as Scalar publications to explore and understand the media specificity of this platform for such a diverse set of creative works. When artists choose this academic platform to create their hypertexts, that begs the questions: Why are these Scalar works? How are the Scalar functionalities used in the works? And what effect does the platform have on the creative content? Although far from delineating discrete genres of (electronic) literature, I consider the use of genre as key in understanding the technological/platform dynamics at play in my case studies. As Daniel Chandler explains, genres can be considered using various criteria which “tend to be based on the notion that [genres] constitute particular conventions of content (such as themes or settings) and/or form (including structure and style) which are shared by the texts which are regarded as belonging to them” [6]. Criteria and definitions of genre are not neutral but always relate to the readers’ basic assumptions about genre that constitute how a given work of literature is perceived. It is the audience’s “cultural capital” [6] which is required to make sense of a text, but perhaps more importantly, this ‘cultural capital’ equips the audience to respond to texts critically within and across genres.

Academia in particular has explicit and implicit customs of creating cultural capital in producing and circulating knowledge. Ways of writing, reviewing, publishing, reading, and citing characterize academic publications. Genre-specific characteristics such as referencing conventions are interpreted as indications of quality. Moreover, use of style and vocabulary make works familiar to an in-crowd. As publication is a primary and principal mode through which scholars get to know each other’s works and build their fields, scrutiny of their medial mode is necessary to understand the field. Nonlinearity and multimediality are pillars of electronic literature, which has used hypertext as a main mode of storytelling and distribution. There have been intermittent experiments with hypertext scholarly journals. Between 1999 and 2001, frAme: Journal of Culture and Technology published six multimedial issues of scholarship and artistic output. Later, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular (2005-2013) gained reputation as a scholarly hypertext and multimedial journal. Additionally, platforms such as Scalar (2013) are specifically developed for humanities scholars to publish in multimedial and hypertextual formats, prime examples of which are the Pathfinders project by Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop and Knotted Line by Evan Bissell et al. The platform Scalar was developed at the University of Southern California specifically to accommodate humanities research. It has various features, including the options to create ‘pathways’ to encourage multilinear readings, hyperlinks to internal and external content, a visualization tool for the various content types in each project, and embedded media pages containing source files and metadata. Scalar features focus on multimedia and metadata to strengthen the academic work by promoting key values in academic publications such as referentiality and proof.

In considering The Scalar Conspiracy, daddylabyrinth: a digital lyric memoir, and Redshift & Portalmetal, then, I need to take the framing of genre into consideration. Not only do these works function as multimodal works with their own media specificity, but this media specificity is also largely influenced by the genres they invoke through using the academic Scalar platform.

2 The Scalar Conspiracy

The Scalar Conspiracy is a short creative work created by Robert Budac in 2016. While learning about Scalar in a course at the University of Alberta, he considered the platform so counter- intuitive that he decided to create a work that parodies the platform itself. His initial experience with Scalar reflects what existing empirical studies of Scalar within the context of digital pedagogy have found. Daniel G. Tracy and Elizabeth Massa Hoiem [10] 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 individually and as a group. In a separate study, Daniel G. Tracy [9] followed 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. My forthcoming research on readership of an academic Scalar publication also reflects an initial learning curve in using the platform. Instead of rejecting the platform, however, Budac used it for the creation of The Scalar Conspiracy, a work of metafiction with second person narration. As a reader, you would be forgiven for thinking upon the first reading that there is hardly anything here. “Scalar is a very useful program” the first line reads, hyperlinking to a, now unavailable, video introduction to the platform. There are no other media or created paths at this point. The page looks bare, showing the out-of-the-box layout without any custom CSS or JavaScript users can implement into their works. The red text, however, gives you a clue to read the comment on the page. Comments are a functionality in Scalar for readers to engage with the academic work they are reading there. The comment is entitled “First!”, reflecting the customs of social media platforms for the first commenter to proudly state that they are the first to comment to the annoyance of other commenters. The contents of the comment reveals that there is a way to read the full work, but only through using the versions feature on Scalar. Scalar has the option to see the previous versions of any given page if the author has selected this to be visible for readers. What follows is essentially an easter egg hunt that parodies Scalar’s affordances such as the version feature and the metadata feature which is only hyperlinked in tiny print at the bottom of each page.

Figure 1: Screenshot of the comment “First!” in The Scalar Conspiracy.

This approach, then, makes full use of the built-in affordances of Scalar as a platform and demonstrates a self-reflexivity of using these affordances as a labyrinth rather than a structured academic text. Rather than just textual nodes on different webpages, Budac uses the specific non-linearity of Scalar, exemplifying the writing and reading practices of all the different types of pages Scalar affords, including the comments, versions, and metadata pages. This interrogation of the platform’s functionality subverts the intended use of the platform by making the work intentionally difficult to read. Although it is used as a form of critique, a similar approach, with possibly a less critical storyline, could be used by Scalar as a static but interactive tutorial for using the platform. After all, the reader is forced to engage with a multiplicity of Scalar features to uncover all the content. Making works intentionally difficult to read is a common characteristic in electronic literature [8], yet in this work it becomes a key technique to create a parody precisely because on the use of Scalar, which is not intended to be difficult to use and read. Sending the reader on this quest draws attention to Scalar in relation to academic writing customs. Prior versions of text in academia are usually reserved for the author themselves saving earlier iterations of the writing process to their servers. While not meant for the public eye because they are unfinished, versions can be seen as revealing a certain deeper truth in literature research. In academia, versions can be practical for authors and editors, but Scalar’s optional feature to make them visible to readers can be interpreted as a form of openness to show gradual progress inherent to academic research. The Scalar Conspiracy goes so far as to have hidden messages in the earlier versions which are then covered up by newer version. This means the reader must play an active investigative role to uncover the work. As such, the work demonstrates a dual value of user interface/experience (UI/UX) and reading experience. UI/UX are terms used in Human- Computer Interaction to refer to the design of a user interface and how it affects the user experience, and they are generally used in practical and technological context. The Scalar Conspiracy parodies the usability shortcomings of the platform, while they are essential to promote the value of reader experience. In terms of genre, then, Budac uses his critical scholarly perspective to interrogate the form of the platform itself. Rather than writing an academic work, however, he created a work of electronic literature which uses various characteristics of nonacademic digital customs. For readers, the expectation of arriving on a scholarly work is immediately broken when arriving on the website. The reader is called upon to use their reading experience with electronic literature instead. The quest within the storyline, however, is ultimately futile, and the main argument that the reader is left with is the scholarly reflection.

3 daddylabyrinth

Author and scholar Steven Wingate encountered Scalar at the Electronic Literature Organization annual conference in 2012 and instantly realized he should use it for a creative work he had been trying to write for decades [13]. This work became daddylabyrinth: a digital lyric memoir, which tells the story of his relationship with his late father through personal narrative and investigative research into his family past. The work’s layout is visibly Scalar with custom script added. The buttons to begin and continue a path, for example, are Scalar’s original design as well as the presentation of images. At the same time, the layout was personalized with a different index and header than Scalar provides. Wingate uses the multimodal and hypertext features of Scalar extensively: daddylabyrinth is packed with photographic and video documentation and uses a structure of pathways to guide the reader through a multilinear reading of his work. These two elements are key in understanding the work as a Scalar project and artwork. daddylabyrinth uses an archival approach that shows the reader old photographs of long-deceased family members and in the text and videos, Wingate reflects on what can be interpreted based on these photographs. Documentation, and photography specifically, has a long history within the genre of autobiography, proposed as a savior of the autobiographical referential status, but “just as autobiographies are obviously artificial representations of lives, so photographs are clearly manufactured images” [2]. Yet, (auto)biographies and memoirs are still considered non-fiction by the vast majority of readers, and despite a more nuanced view on the referentiality of both text and photographs, (auto)biographies are still interpreted as a reflection of one or more lives. This tension is visibly in daddylabyrinth, for example in the path “THE FORBEAR” about the grandfather Wingate has never met due to the grandfather’s untimely death. Thus, a partial transition is made from memoir to relational autobiography as other family members become the main focus of the narrative beyond Wingate’s direct experience. Wingate spurs the reader on to “Take a good look at it before you click forward” and then speculates on his grandfather’s life in relation to the images he has, “Am I reading things into this picture? Nah. Look at that mug again, up close. Even at such low resolution you can see the scorn.” [12] The documents hereby become metonymy for the person his grandfather was, instead of a snapshot or simply a piece of paper. At the core of the work, this way of dealing with documents, both photographs and texts, keeps returning.

Figure 2: Screenshot of the page “SHOWING THE STRAIN” in the path “THE FOREBEAR”.

Although there is an overarching table of contents available, daddylabyrinth has an intricate – we might say labyrinthine – structure of different pages belonging to paths and subpaths. Some pages also appear in multiple paths, which means the reader will interpret the work differently based on the context of pages read before them. For example, the page “military man” is page 3 of 8 in the chapter/path “INCITING INCIDENTS”, a title referring to the conventional Aristotelian plot structure that requires ‘inciting incidents’ to start a narrative. In INCITING INCIDENTS, reader learn about the family history of migration and it contains the path “THE FORBEAR” which contains extensive information and reflection about Wingate’s grandfather. One of the pictures we see is Wingate’s father as an orphaned teenager, which then leads to the page “the military man”, in which readers, along with Wingate, try to make sense of his father’s military service through a set of information and dates. The page “the military man” also occurs, however, in chapter 3 “THE FOSSIL RECORD”, as page 1 of 4 in the path “PAPERWORK”. This new contextualization gives more context about the research process Wingate has had to go through and how all the paperwork needed to be digested. In the video diaries, Wingate speaks of “go[ing] down the rabbit hole”, “put[ting] together some kind of timeline”, and reflecting that he “did not know how troubled” his father was. This acts as a premonition for the information revealed later, and makes it more hard-hitting for readers as Wingate’s process has become part of the narration. Moving beyond the basic plot structure of ‘inciting incidents’, the more personal the narrative becomes the deeper one digs into the paths, from dates and archival documents to videos of Wingate’s struggles and the personal demons he’s inherited from his male ancestors.

4 Redshift & Portalmetal

micha cárdenas’ 2014 work Redshift & Portalmetal is hardly recognizable as a Scalar work, bar the familiar heading at the top of the page. Other than that, the hypertext fiction work recalls the Twine platform1. Notably, cárdenas introduces the work as “built with HTML5 video, CSS and Javascript, using the Scalar e- publishing platform”. This customization hides the out-of-the-box interface characteristics and replaces the index and ‘continue’ buttons with textual hyperlinks. In addition, the work is characterized by videos in the background of the page. This does nothing, however, to diminish the relevance of the Scalar platform, as the main entry points to the work highlights that is was in fact created in Scalar. Not only does cárdenas mention this on her website and does she thank the Scalar development team by name in her acknowledgements, Redshift & Portalmetal was also included in the Electronic Literature Collection 3. On the ELC3 website, the editorial statement adds that Scalar is an unexpected platform for the work, but that cárdenas utilizes Scalar’s integration of video. Moreover, works in ELC3 are tagged with keywords, mainly referring to the narrative and technological styles of the works. Whereas the keyword “Flash” is added to a host of different works, Redshift & Portalmetal is the only work under “Scalar”. The choice to include Scalar as a keyword and in the editorial statement does show that the platform is considered meaningful in guiding the readers’ expectations of the work. More than a practical consideration, however, the production in Scalar influences how the reader might come to the work. The hypertext narrates a trans woman of color’s interplanetary travels and lets the reader make decisions as to which planets she visits, how to prepare the trip, and how to handle border control. The work starts with an unembellished “Your planet is dying.” after which the reader is given the options “Stay and help” and ”Go to the Ice Planet”, hyperlinked to different pages to continue reading.

[^1]: A comparison between Scalar’s and Twine’s functionalities and reading practices is beyond the scope of this paper.

Staying turns out to be futile: “I thought I could just drop everything and stay and care for [my planet] and help her live a little longer, but then I realized how sick she was making me, how she’s been sick her whole life and I’ve felt pulled to stay even though I wanted to go to the stars and have a new, unimaginable life.” The page after, the reader is presented with “Go to the Ocean Moon” and ”Go to the Ice Planet” as the only options, demonstrating that despite choice, options can turn out to be more limited in the reality that unfolds. At other points in the narrative(s), the reader makes more difficult decisions for the Roja, the main character. Being transgender comes with many concerns, because how will the character get her hormones on another planet? Will she “borrow from a friend” or try “DIY biopiracy through body hacking”? It is up to the reader. Although this is a science fiction work, many concerns are paralleled to the concerns trans people of color face today, such as navigating border control when your passport shows the wrong gender and dead name as well as being profiled more as a person of color. The narrative gives a complex account of dealing with these prejudices as well as reflecting on the relative privileges the main character Roja has as a mixed-race light-skinned person of color in relation to her girlfriend Cora: “When you cross with Cora, who is much darker, they never let you through without being searched. “Go ahead,” the guard says, handing back your passport, without even asking for your documents”. Redshift & Portalmetal both supports and challenges readerly expectations of the science fiction genre, which is known to reflect on societal issues. Throughout the work, the narration touches on themes of colonization, climate collapse, gender, and disability via every-day occurrences and interactions rather than overarching statements. The science fictional approach, then, is less of an anxiety about a changing future and more concern about what could stay the same.

Figure 3: Screenshot of the page “talk to the border guard” in Redshift & Portalmetal. Please note that on the webpage, the background is moving video.

cárdenas is both artist and scholar, studying migration, performance, and mobility in digital media by trans people of color. Her creative and scholarly work overlap and entangle, and on her website, cárdenas introduces Redshift & Portalmetal as a work that is part of courses on environmental literature and gender as well as electronic literature and digital humanities, showing an interest in both the content and medial from of the work from a scholarly perspective. Within that context, Redshift & Portalmetal is at once a work of fiction and of theory, bending the genres to take advantage of their possibilities in authorship and readership. The speculative form of theory-building allows the scholarly work not to be restrained by (relative lack of) empirical studies and inversely encourages the creative work to reflect on realities of many marginalized people in the present and future. The inclusion of video backgrounds encourages this combination of genres. Using video of landscapes that we must assume were filmed on earth, some of which contain the author herself moving or standing still, strengthens the notion that the work is at once speculative and contemporary. The work is well suited as a DH work in Scalar, while subverting the more common Scalar characteristics of overview and comprehension as cornerstones of the multimodal presentation of research. There is no table of contents or other overview of the pages, so the reader has to make decisions based on uncertainty of what comes next, which creates an intense experience. Some pages of the narrative give the readers multiple options whereas others give only one option to continue, reflecting the ways marginalized groups have to make many micro-decisions in daily life that others are not aware of, while at the same time having a distinct lack of options available. By making certain choices, the reader gets rewarded with new texts and images. The hyperlinks, then, are yet another way to create a sense of revealing that was created by versions in The Scalar Conspiracy and in images in daddylabyrinth. The work promotes the value of experience rather than documentation as the revealing of text by making choices is what enables true reflection.

5 Concluding Remarks: Deviating from the Path

Robert Budac’s The Scalar Conspiracy, Steven Wingate’s daddylabyrinth: a digital lyric memoir and micha cárdenas’ Redshift & Portalmetal all use different Scalar affordances to create a multimodal narrative. It is not only the use of multimedia and nonlinearity that influences readers, but also the fact that Scalar is known as an academic platform. A platform, of course, cannot always dictate how it will be used. Scalar is honed specifically for humanities publications, but these authors have appropriated the affordances and context of the platform to create their own creative works. The results are vastly different in topic, style, and narrative, yet they share some significant overlap. If one were to speak of “Scalar fiction” as a genre, parallel to Twine games or Flash poetry, the variety of my case studies shows that Scalar does not seem to impose or determine a certain aesthetic. Rather, Scalar fiction is characterized by the premise that the platform’s academic context strengthens the narrative. The multimodal hypertexts create a fragmentation that is integral to the referentiality of the narratives, displaying both a “poetics of a hypertext node” [7] and reliance of each node on the once surrounding them. They are all labyrinths one needs to wander inside to get to the next stage. The reader never knows what’s next and what connections need to be drawn between the current and the next page. This characteristic is inherent to most hypertexts [3] but especially striking in Scalar works as the wandering process subverts scholarly conventions that dictate the reader needs to be guided with clarity. The Scalar Conspiracy has a ‘detective’ quality, in which the reader needs to uncover the narrative hidden in the features of the platform. daddylabyrinth narrates through documents that have a referential or ‘evidential’ status that is quickly destabilized in the reflections and video logs. Redshift & Portalmetal make the reader part of the everyday life decisions that Roja has to make without knowing what is ahead. As such, the works fit within what Jill Walker calls “feral hypertexts” [11], which “won’t do what we expect and [...] refuse to stay put within boundaries we’ve defined”. Yet rather than the messiness and lack of context highlighted by Walker, these Scalar creative works do not rely on creating confusion or erasure of context. The works each use a combination of contexts to their advantage to create genre-bending works that both build on the connotations provided by Scalar and actively subvert these connotations as well. Therefore, the complex media specificity of these electronic literature works should not instigate relativism or skepticism towards academic work on Scalar. Instead, researching the multimodality and academic context as integral parts of the narrative structure opens up the opportunity to reckon with the platform specificity across genres.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank dr. Inge van de Ven for her feedback on this paper as well as the Digital Culture Research Group at the University of Bergen (Norway) led by Jill Walker Rettberg for their support of my research. I also extend my appreciation to my anonymous peer reviewers for their generous reflections which influence both this short paper and my future research on this topic.

References

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