Learning Scalar: How to build non-linear, born-digital content on York's Scalar platform

Understand How Scalar Thinks About Content

One of Scalar's most powerful features is its flexibility. This flexibility comes from the way the platform is designed, and how it manages content. In Scalar, everything is an object, and every object has properties: for example, the page you are reading now is an object that has an assigned background image, a simple layout, and some descriptive metadata.

When you are adding content to Scalar, you'll be adding or creating one of two things:
  1. Pages. These may include text, embedded media (video, audio, or images), or "Scalar widgets" that display maps, timelines, visualizations, or galleries
  2. Media. These are single media objects that are either imported from existing locations on the web (for example, YouTube, the Internet Archive, or the York University Digital Library), or uploaded directly into Scalar.
Each of these things has a number of settings that you can apply:
  1. A layout, which describes how the object will look. By default, the layout is "basic," meaning the object is displayed on its own. Pages have more than a dozen possible layouts, creating many possibilities for visually interesting or even interactive content. Media are more limited: they can be displayed as "basic" content, or in a format that displays all of the media's metadata in a table.
  2. Some styling options, which include things like background image, image thumbnail, or even an audio file that will play when the page is loaded.
  3. Properties, which include the URL for the object and whether or not it is visible (public)
  4. Metadata, which are a set of fields and values used to describe the content. For example, you may add information about an object's author, its creation date, a location, a licence, or many other descriptive pieces of information. There are many different standards and schema for metadata, and you can learn more in our free guide.
Additionally, you can specify relationships between objects. Most commonly, these are described as paths or tags. We'll address those in another section of this guide, but the gist is this: a tag is used to relate objects by topic or theme, in no specific order; a path is similar, but defines the order in which things are related. For example, I might tag bananas, cherries and apples as fruit... or I might put them on a path as apples, bananas, and then cherries to make sure they appear in alphabetical order every time.

The critical difference between Scalar and other platforms is that a piece of content in Scalar can be more than one thing at the same time. For example, a piece of media can be a page, a tag, a path, or any combination of those things. Taking the fruit example from above, I can tag apples, bananas, ans cherries as fruit and I can ALSO put them on a path the specifies alphabetical order. In fact, I can also create a tag for "red" that includes apples and cherries, or create a path that indicates the order in which all three fruits appear in my local market's produce aisle.

As a result of defining all of these relationships, I don't have to create a page to tell readers what order my book's chapters go in: I simply put the chapters on a path, and Scalar builds a table of contents for me. I also don't have to prescribe how people experience my content: readers may be interested in exploring fruit by color, or by arrangement, and Scalar will let them navigate content according to all of my available tags or paths. In addition, the information stored in each object's metadata provides Scalar the information required to automatically create maps, timelines, image collections, and more.

When you are starting a Scalar project, this flexibility can be overwhelming. Our advice is to focus first on your content: the media or knowledge that you want to share. Once everything is "in the system," you can experiment with the relationships to see the interesting ways that Scalar can exhibit your material.
 

This page has paths: