In class, I made a small Scalar project on crocheting. However, I immediately learned the truth of Jessica Bocinski’s words: you need to know what you’re doing ahead of time, before starting a Scalar project.

Scalar’s page renaming system does not change what the page is called in the “recent” tab. This made my in-class project very difficult to work with, because I had accidently made two pages called “home” and they both appeared in the “recent pages” tab. This was the most frustrating thing I found about Scalar, finding pages or media once they were uploaded. Therefore, I created a new project from scratch for the practicum, where I planned ahead of time what I would need. This is a Scalar Project retelling the Agatha Christie novel “The Mysterious Affair at Styles”. I learned that Scalar is much easier to use when things are planned out ahead of times. My main difficultly in this project was ensuring the links to media all worked correctly. I learned a lot about how to create paths, which I found interesting. The pages are far from perfect, but it was fun to set up the project. I learned the difference, for example, between the image carousel and the card widget, and why each would be useful in different circumstances.

Much like the widgets, using Scalar, WordPress, or Storymaps are all useful, but in different circumstances. Scalar is a great source for telling stories with linked pages, or for museums. Storymaps and Adobe Spark, however, are good for presentations with a single page. My Storymap presentation raised a lot of interesting research questions to me, which making a similar Scalar project would not do; however, trying to tell a murder mystery through Storymaps would be a frustrating experience. WordPress’s tagging system is superior, but it is fundamentally a blogging site, without the paths that are so useful on Scalar. I am glad that we are learning all of these different tools, because each has its own use for different kinds of projects.

Scalar link again: https://scalar.chapman.edu/scalar/the-mysterious-affair-at-styles-/index?path=emily-inglethorp-has-died