Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform developed by the University of Southern California that’s designed to make it easy for authors (faculty or students) to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Projects that are best suited to Scalar are media rich and able to take advantage of the unique capabilities of digital writing. Scalar also supports collaborative authoring, reader commentary, and the annotation of video, audio, images, and text.

Fordham University beta tested Scalar for academic use during the Fall 2016 semester, and now has opened up access to this tool to all faculty, staff and students. Scalar has been used in graduate and undergraduate courses to help Fordham students become comfortable creating multi-threaded, non-linear texts, and using paths, tags, and annotations to innovatively curate their material.

This Introduction to Scalar will be both an overview of the tool, as well as hands-on workshop to explore Scalar through the creation of a quick Scalar project.

Attendees are urged to bring images and text that they would like to use in this workshop, although generic material will be provided as well.

Skill Level
Beginner

Prerequisites
None

Requirements
A collection of sample images and text would be useful, but not necessary to bring.