Critical Sections, a project from the Memory issue of Vectors authored by Greg J. Smith and designed by Erik Loyer, has received a Jury’s Choice Award as part of the Media Arts Show at the 2012 Electronic Literature Organization Conference. In Critical Sections, the user draws with drawings—calling to the screen a collection of observations on domesticity in Los Angeles by triggering mashups of architectural renderings for eight prototype homes with images from eight films set in, or explicitly about the city.

In other ELO happenings, the conference schedule includes a panel called “Vectors, Scalar, and Magic” featuring Mark Marino, Craig Dietrich, and Erik Loyer discussing how the rich collaborations of the Vectors journal have laid the foundation for Scalar, the new scholarly publishing platform currently in development by members of the Vectors team.

Another new Scalar project: The Knotted Line, a “tactile laboratory” created by artist/educator Evan Bissell that explores the nature of freedom and confinement in the United States. True to its name, The Knotted Line represents the intertwined histories of incarceration, education and labor through a collection of miniature paintings by Bissell depicting over 50 historical moments, all connected by a flowing, interactive line that can be pushed, pulled, and opened to reveal the imagery and content inside. This dynamic interface, designed and developed by Vectors’s creative director Erik Loyer, is almost wholly driven by material authored in Scalar—the first project to use Scalar in this way.

Each painting of The Knotted Line is annotated with brief glosses which introduce the historical event it depicts, and then link to an expanded treatment of the event in Scalar’s native reading interface, featuring embedded videos, images, and resources for educators. The complete timeline, which focuses on the geographical area of the United States, covers over 500 years of history, including some hopeful speculation about future events.

The Knotted Line shows the versatility of Scalar in the way in which it uses the same store of content to drive radically different, yet complementary presentations. Scalar’s ability to add arbitrary metadata using popular ontologies like Dublin Core and ArtSTOR made it possible to include the temporal and spatial coordinates needed by the tactile interface, while still keeping content visible and editable within Scalar’s default presentation.

Because of the visual, pedagogical, and historical nature of its content, The Knotted Line represents a dataset with its own creative potential for remix and reuse. To encourage this, the project’s creators have included a “Data Sources” path which explains where to find useful resources like 300 dpi versions of each painting, an XML file that defines every point of the “knotted line” itself, and more—a great example of how the open access philosophy behind Scalar enables projects to function simultaneously as publications, websites, archives, and services. As a result, the potential exists to reformat The Knotted Line as a poster, a game, or some unforeseen mashup with another data source; we’re excited by the possibilities.

We’re happy to announce that the latest Scalar publication to go live is the digital companion to Matthew Delmont’s new book The Nicest Kids in Town (University of California Press), which explores American Bandstand’s discriminatory policies against black youth in Philadelphia—contrary to the claims of host Dick Clark that he integrated the show in its early years. Delmont’s digital project features over 100 images and video clips, including memorabilia, newspaper clippings, and vintage clips from American Bandstand. The Scalar publication first began to take shape at the NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities in Summer 2011.

Delmont’s project uses Scalar’s “paths” feature to organize his material into three main sections: “Bandstand’s Local Years: 1952-1957,” “America’s Bandstand: 1957-1964,” and “Remembering American Bandstand,” each replete with media illustrations. As the screen shot above (taken from one of Scalar’s built-in visualizations) illustrates, media (shown in green) comprises roughly 3/4 of the discrete content elements in the project, and is extensively referenced (media links are represented as green arcs).

Delmont recently spoke about his research on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman and Juan González.

ANVC’s Craig Dietrich joined a group of scientists, humanists, and archivists for a weekend at the New York Public Library to discuss workflows between digital archives, linked data, and authors. At the Compatible Data Initiative conference, Dietrich presented Scalar’s use of XSLT and RDF technology to seemlessly bridge the platform with partner archives including Critical Commons and the Internet Archive. He concluded his talk with a call for publishing platforms to encourage responsible use of media through import features that maintain metadata records and templates that balance voice in both text and image.

Dietrich co-presented with UMaine Still Water co-director Jon Ippolito, who featured the Metaserver, an emerging tool for linking records across archives.

Both Scalar and the Metaserver can point to resources without needing to create a local copy, meaning they can outsource the labor of updating references to the various collections to those curators who are in a better position to do so. And both are free and open-source software. (Still Water blog)