This workshop will serve as an introduction to Scalar, a free, open source authoring and publishing platform designed for scholars writing media-rich, born-digital scholarship. Developed by The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture at the University of Southern California, Scalar allows scholars to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose that media with their own writing in a variety of ways; to annotate video, audio, images, source code and text using the platform’s built-in media annotation tools; and to structure essay- and book-length works in ways that take advantage of the unique capabilities of digital writing, including nested, recursive, and non-linear formats. The workshop will cover basic features of the platform, including a review of existing Scalar books and a hands-on introduction to paths, tags, annotations and importing media.

The workshop will be led by Curtis Fletcher and Craig Dietrich.

Curtis Fletcher is the Associate Director of the Ahmanson Lab at USC Libraries and a Co-PI on Scalar. His research spans the history of technology, the history of humanities education, science and technology studies, and visual studies. He specializes in digital research and writing in the humanities with particular expertise in new models for authoring, credentialing, and publishing born-digital, multimodal, humanities schola

Craig Dietrich is a digital artist, scholar, educator and co-creator of the Scalar platform.