 Okay. It looks like it's time to get started. I see there are still a few people joining us, but we should start pretty much on time. Welcome everybody. I'm Cliff Lynch, the director of CNI, and I'm delighted you can join us with this closing plenary talk for our virtual spring meeting. I'm sorry that you couldn't join all of us last night for our intended reception in San Diego. It would have been a pleasure to see you all in person. But we still have some wonderful, wonderful things for you. Many of you saw, I believe, Rob Sanderson's opening plenary yesterday, which was, I thought, tremendous and really thought-provoking. And for those of you who couldn't join us for that, we hope to have the video available pretty soon. I want to note that while this is the closing plenary of our virtual meeting, our virtual meeting will continue on through the end of May. And we have many breakout project briefings scheduled over that period. You should have received information about them and how to sign up for them. That you're here is a very good sign that you've got that information because you managed to get here. And we will be adding some other events over that period. You'll get announcements on those as well. Today, though, we're here to hear from Tara McPherson and just a couple of very brief mechanical things before I introduce Tara. Many of us have become much more expert with Zoom over the past week or two than we plan to be necessarily. So I'll just touch on this slightly. We are in what is technically called webinar mode as opposed to meeting mode, which means that video and audio from the participants is turned off by default when you join. Tara has agreed to take some questions at the end, and we'll be doing that through the Q&A button down at the bottom of the screen. Basically, when we call for questions, you can just click on that and it'll give you a box and you can put your question in. And I will sort of sort those and relay them to Tara. And she's agreed to field some. So that's about all I think I need to say about that. So let me turn and introduce Tara and I am delighted to welcome Tara back to CNI. She has been part of the CNI community for literally decades now. She is the, she's a professor and department chair at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, and has been a genuine pioneer in a number of scholarly communications platforms that were targeted for primarily humanistic scholarly communication. First a system called Vectors, and then more recently a system called Scalar. These are, these were both important systems, both significantly and by design very different from each other and attempting to address different parts of the spectrum of scholarly communication. They're both not only significant in their adoption and what they contributed to the communication of the digital humanities in the advance of the field, but also because now they've had enough adoption and enough time that Tara can really reflect on what's been done on them and what's been learned through the course of their, you know, maturing and adoption and ongoing lives. I want to note that Tara is doing this is this is one small piece of Tara's scholarly scope which just continues to blow me away. I had two recent books out one titled feminist in a software lab, and the other an edited volume on digital youth innovation and the unexpected. Both of those came out in 2018. And she's currently working on a really fascinating study about the use of online platforms to transmit hate speech and and how that ecosystem operates. You can find a much more elaborated biography on the, on the website, but I'm just looking forward to Tara's both enthusiasm and insight. Those are two traits I associate very strongly with her work and her presentations and with that, I am going to go away and turn it over to Tara. I'll be back at the end to moderate questions. Over to you Tara. Thanks a lot Cliff, and thanks to Diane and Beth and everyone at CNI for putting this together. And thanks to those of you in the audience as I was getting things together this morning I thought that, you know, it's a very odd thing to be talking about these projects in the moment of crisis that we're in. And I hope that at the very least, you know, having something to focus on for a bit, rather than your social media feeds will will give you a bit of break from the kind of relentless stream of information I think a lot of us are navigating right now. I hope that you and your loved ones are safe. And I can also say this is the first time that I've ever done a keynote in yoga pants, but since I'm seated you won't know that you probably know that that's one of the real benefits of zoom right is only dressing from the waist up, but I'm going to take a slightly out path today to reflect on about 20 years of working in the design of digital media and digital platforms. And I'm going to kind of indulge myself just a little bit to tell you some about how I came to do this work, because I think it's important for understanding the projects I've worked on. Then I'll briefly tell you a bit about vectors and scalar, the projects that Cliff mentioned in case you're not familiar with them. And then, you know, midway through and at the end reflect some on the lessons that I think I've learned as we move through the process of building both of these experiments. But now I want to go way back to some time in the 1990s and I'm awake from a dream and realize that I've been dreaming in the most vivid color of my life and happening deeply cinematic sequences full of interesting camera angles that shimmer and with light and shadow. I've noticed that my dreams have become highly edited really intricate shifting sequences of narrative of point and view. And I realize that my brain has begun to process at a very visceral level, the lessons of film production that I'm learning in a graduate seminar on feminist film. And, you know, deep in my unconscious at night, exploring that visual language of film, even as I sleep. At that moment in the 90s, I was enrolled in an intense doctoral program in an English department that was focused heavily on what we've been called high theory, and also on feminist film. And, you know, in those years as a graduate student, I definitely dreamed about theory, but these dreams are different. They're cinematic, and they're activating other senses. And they're moving me around and through the theory that I'm also studying, but in different and related ways. And that that moment in which I realized that making that my physical interaction with video and with film, we're really shaping my capacity to know, began to inaugurate what would be a decades long commitment to practice to forms of physical in the world, and also a grounding across my career in an allegiance to feminist practice and to feminist activism. So, you know, I could as an origin story apocryphal or not, you know, really kind of locate much of what I've come to do since that time, through an experience that allowed me to make, in this case film, in a way that encouraged me to think across a theory practice divide. And that experientially came to guide how I navigate my career now and media studies, and in the digital humanities, really kind of helping to explain how against like any kind of predictable logic, I became a feminist in a software lab. Across the arts and humanities I think theory and practice these days are often poorly integrated in our universities. Arts practice is almost always cleaved away from art history at my university those disciplines are in different schools. Few film and media scholars are also media makers, digital design and programming get taught in different buildings in a stream across campus and very different places. And these divisions are really reinforced by structures that make it hard to combine theory and practice or the sciences with the humanities in our curricula evaluation and promotion structures in different disciplinary methodologies, and in the forms of scholarly output that we privilege in the academy in a variety of ways, makers, folks called media specialists, lab technologists, less often hold tenured positions, or professorships, and labs often serve rigidly reinforce hierarchical distinctions across the university. My employer, the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles has long claimed to integrate theory and practice. So students in all of our disciplines take courses in both making and kind of hands on production, whether digitally or not, and in theory and history, and we are committed to that crossover, but honestly the programs are poorly integrated in much of their design. In an attempt more recently to figure out how to heal this divide between making and critical theory, the school launched the Institute for Multimedia Literacy in 1998, at about the time I arrived on campus. And that was a research institute that was really committed to thinking about building a space where students and faculty could move across the theory practice divide in digital media. That institute has since grown into a new division in the school called Media Arts and Practice, which includes one of the few practice based PhD programs in the United States, where students produce digital dissertations that are hybrid in a variety of forms. And we also now have an undergraduate major and minor in that division. In its original form, the IML was a lab of sorts, rather like a studio, it was housed off campus, or on the edge of campus in a lovely modernist building with lab like classrooms and a kind of space for experimentation and freedom outside of curricular structures. In its current form, it's more institutionalized reality I want to talk a little bit more about later about what happens as we standardized forms and institutionalize them. And now, MAP includes a series of research labs with particular structures as well. So as a program as a physical space as a community, MAP fosters aesthetic experimentation, but it's deeply tied to critical theory to notions of social justice and activism into questions of representation. So I'll tell you just really quickly about a few grad student projects that come out of the space to give you a sense of its scope and how it relates to kind of other work that I undertake in the collectives I work in. So first is a project called Lady Mouth by Sarah System. It's a chatbot that Sarah built that is meant to engage with trolls on the internet, and it goes into Reddit and replies to misogynist language with quotes from feminist, a variety of feminist. And Sarah has been tracking the replies to the chatbot's interactions and looking in particular at how long it takes folks to realize they're interacting with a bot and not with a feminist. I mean, there are obvious reasons to have a bot do this work for you, given the kind of violent interaction women often experience online when they try to intervene in spaces. So this is a project that's both performative in the kind of tradition of feminist performance art and technological in its engagement in a particular space. Catherine Griffiths who's just finishing her dissertation is working to really kind of think about understanding algorithmic procedure and has worked with scientists to build a series of tools that visualize decision trees for AI and algorithmic processes often to kind of foreground junctures where decisions are being made that are not completely thought through as the program kind of grows in its own accord. Triton Mobley is working on visualization and race and new media and his design to series of projects which help us think through how color matters and comes to be in digital spaces. And finally, Samantha Gorman runs a fairly successful interactive studio called Tinder clause that does a variety of publication and game design. Tinder is an AR game that's very satirical is very successful. It trains you to feed your emotions to the AI through an AR interface. They've just released a new project for the Oculus called the under presents. So it's you know she's simultaneously recently finished a dissertation and has also released several commercial games at the same time. So across the division, there's a real commitment to hands on production. There's also an explicit commitment to theoretical inquiry to activism to social justice practice and to really producing multimodal outcomes that extend beyond written dissertation explaining practice based work but to actually have components of the dissertation be practice based themselves. My own lab work began at the old IML and I work closely with students in the media arts and practice program. IML supported vectors in the early days which I'll talk about briefly and later the authoring platform scalar, but such hybrid programs I think are still pretty rare in the US, particularly at a department level that allow students to move fluidly across theory and practice alongside political commitments, but their numbers are growing. And we also see as I think many of you probably participate in various types of maker spaces labs and collaboratories dotted across our university landscapes often housed in libraries, although sometimes in departments. Still, I think these programs often meet familiar forms of resistance. Some such reactions might just be categorized as academic resistance to change a kind of traditionalism within the academy that tends to favor structures and approaches that we already know and to treat emerging paradigms with a degree of suspicion, but another vector of opposition to these changes comes from those whose worries I think are a bit different. These critics worry that innovation labs and maker spaces, you too closely to the kind of techno utopian logics that we see coming out of Silicon Valley, and I'm actually pretty sympathetic to these arguments. In the US, it's not hard to see that their lines of convergence between curricular programs and digital technologies and the needs of corporate technology firms. Some of these firms actually fund labs at my university and probably at some of yours, and others are firm are funded by different corporate benefactors focused on entrepreneurship or innovation. And I believe there's really no doubt that such sponsorship torque scholarship in very particular ways, ways we might be wary of. And yet these very pressures I think necessitate not a repudiation by the humanities of the digital, but rather a demand that humanity scholars increasingly operate within that very space. I think their unique skill sets humanity scholars and artists bring to the table that allow us to imagine technology differently, and to raise important questions about the ethics of technological design. If we're really concerned about the escalating corporatization of our campuses from online learning platforms to new regimes of management to visualize labor to the inroads that zoom is making and this crisis that we're now inhabiting, then an engagement with technology and the digital seems a crucial, if not only way to really mitigate and investigate some of these concerns. And I would argue their recent precedents in the history of the university that suggests to us how such work might take shape. My early my graduate education and early scholarly career centered on film and media studies, the feminist film work that I began with. My PhD program was in an English department, the opportunity to engage in media practice existed along the margins of the curriculum. One class in particular profoundly rejiggered how I would come to understand the relationship of making to theory, leading to the vivid dreams I started this talk with. It was a team talk course by the film theorist Patricia Malacamp, and the feminist video artist Cecilia Condon, and an interesting side note is Cecilia is now in her 70s and has recently become a tick tock star, she was featured recently in the New York Times. Students in our seminar were encouraged to reach outside of their comfort zones and to work in a medium that was less familiar to them. So in my case as someone who primarily was a writer in the class I was expected to make films. That experience deeply reconfigured how I understood feminism and collaboration, and it gave me a hands on engagement with making that still really shapes my research. In the class we were investigating how one might make media in dialogue with ideological feminist critique. And the course structure made it clear that the two were intricately interwoven that you needed to have both in order to achieve a fuller picture. These types of interactions are incredibly important lessons for how we might conceive of the rich possibilities for a politically engaged humanities based engagement with digital technologies. Feminist film studies emerged from an entanglement with what we now call critical making, even if the terminology at the time was different. We could trace decades of feminist media makers blurring the line between theory and practice. Their work powerfully illustrates how theory and making exists in rich political feedback loops. They understood that technology mattered, and that we needed to study technologies, but also to use them in new ways. Still, feminist film and media studies today does not always exhibit such strong ties to practice. It was as was evident in the 70s and 80s, when feminist were working both in and outside of the academy in very deliberate ways. The conjuncture of theory and practice that was so crucial to the field has been hard to maintain as feminism has been institutionalized within the academy. I see this split as a loss to the field. I think that now many feminist film scholars are not in direct contact with practices of making. And I think that impoverishes the work that we might do. Digital media studies and digital humanities now offer the possibility for renewing the forms of dialectic and interdisciplinary inquiry that was so valued by feminist film scholars in the 70s and 80s. While there's no guarantee that emerging makers labs and digital design programs will hold theory and practice or ethics and making in productive tension toward progressive ends, they can offer a place for such work to unfold if we design our programs carefully. I have spent much of the past two decades working through an experimenting with feminism and with intersectional and deeply collaborative technological design, first with the journal vectors and now with the software platform scalar, which these days is housed at the lab in the USC libraries. Vectors began over 15 years ago as a space for experimentation in the beginning in screen languages in open access publishing and in collaborative design and authorship. The core production team was very small. Our teams remain quite small. And at the time Steve Anderson and I were editors, Eric lawyer and Reagan Kelly were creative directors and Craig Dietrich served as technical lead. Just in the film school, we focused more on questions of the expressive capacities for media and on interface than a large scale digitization or text analysis. So we were outliers in many ways in what would become the digital humanities focused on different sets of questions. We aimed to publish work that couldn't exist in print, while also exploring new infrastructures for distribution and free access. Our initial process production wasn't really like a journal, but instead featured a fellowship model that brought scholars in for kind of summer camp to work with our team and to begin the act of collaboratively collaboratively building projects that allow the scholar to express an argument in multimedia. And the first journal issue went live in 2005. This image is a screen grab from those that first issue in the winter of 2005 and you could see already that, you know, it's a bit wacky for a journal. The stack of images to the far right, the text in red are the table of contents, which you could shuffle and realign in different ways. So there was always a kind of playfulness in the journal in its interface tried to communicate that active play. We were interested in how multimodal expression might allow for different relationships to form a form to content and wanted to explore the specificities of digital media for politically engaged scholarship. We asked how scholarship might more directly engage the emotions and multiple senses. We wondered how new media might come together with the concerns of feminism of critical race studies of activism of environmental critique and of queer theory. We worked at the nexus of the arts and humanities, rather than the humanities and the sciences. A piece like public secrets by Sharon Daniel with Eric lawyer brought together many hours of audio footage testimony of imprisoned women at Chalcilla, the largest women's prison in the country. Daniels had collected this oral testimony in her work with the organization justice now. The user can navigate the piece by a series of themes like inside outside public secret utopia through individual women stories, or in a more random fashion. The aesthetic design and structure of the project reinforce its goals, calling our attention to the shifting borders between inside and outside incarceration and freedom, oppression and resistance. By navigating the piece, the fine lines demarcating the binder the binaries shift and morph reconfigure and grow fuzzy unsettling easy assumptions about us and them in a carceral state. It's intersectional in both its design and concept. The project also moved beyond the borders of the university being used both by activist organizations in challenging the prison complex, but also being exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. A project like public secrets begins to imagine new possibilities for the archive as it mutates into the database. I'd like to think of it and many of the vectors projects as databases with points of view that are really meant to contextualize the database, guiding the viewers emergence in the piece with the logic of a video game. So every time you interact with the piece, it will be different based on choices you make, and what is opened up to you as you choose particular choices. I would say it encourages exploration, more than mastery or completion, and a variety of other vectors projects attempted similar things. This is a project called dead reckoning. It explores military vision and perspective, and was really a kind of prequel to a book on the same topic that the scholar Karen Kaplan has recently published. Jennifer Terry created killer entertainments launched, you know, before we had YouTube as a project that collected hundreds of online videos produced by soldiers during the Afghanistan conflict, and then really deterred those videos to help us understand the visual logics of masculinity and wartime. Emily Thompson built a project which located historic archive of sound complaints in New York over a historic map that allows the viewer and the user to kind of hear historic sounds of New York and interact with the project in a variety of ways. Many of these projects were nominated for webbies were featured on, you know, public radio received a fair amount of press. But you know vectors projects were weird and unique. They rewarded slow reading. They really required attention and care from the user, asking the user to stop and think, and also to linger and feel. They weren't really interested in data mining a million photographs or producing a quantitative analysis, as they were invested in layering the interpretive humanities techniques which many of us still cherish within a digital environment, allowing for close reading and textual annotation. But as much as I love the work that we did with vectors I think of many of the projects I've participated in over a career. It's still my favorite. There were many problems with it as well. We stopped publishing in 2013. As you can see from this slide. The projects were mostly one offs. They were labor intensive and demanding to create. When you carefully integrate form and content for every project, you're faced with hundreds of hours of design and programming time, even after we developed special middleware tools with Craig Dietrich, which streamlined the production process. So obviously such a production can't such a process can't really scale. It's not something that you could reduce to a template and roll out to many, many users. The projects also demanded a great deal from every reader for each piece had its own unique design logic that could be confusing or hard to navigate. Learning to interact with one piece didn't guarantee you could easily decipher the next because each used its own aesthetic format. These elements I think combined to make the projects challenging for long term preservation and sustainability. Many of the projects were built in flash and you know will become increasingly inaccessible as new browsers on stop supporting that platform. I love the capacities impeded in flash, but I think we're still not well suited to save projects built in flash and many of those are now obsolescing. Most of the projects never worked on iPads is still illustrating because we predated the iPad illustrating the ways that corporate turf wars can really come to destabilize scholarly projects. Importantly, the pieces poorly address the needs of disabled users and ongoing issue with many digital projects, which I think the scholarly community grapples with, but probably doesn't have the resources that needs to adequately address. In an ideal world, I believe that each scholarly project would find the design and structure best suited to its individual evidence argument and purpose, and many times that format will be a print book. The world is hard to fund, and perhaps even harder to sustain and preserve. In many ways these vectors projects were anticipating apps for they incorporated multiple senses, even touch into beautifully designed packages that served ear, I and hand. At first launched viewers were sometimes perplexed by the interfaces, but after several years of sweeping across iPads, the interfaces I think seem a little less experimental today. Moving from vectors and those kinds of constraints we we discovered as we built the projects. We developed Scalar, a robust multimedia authoring platform that addresses a lot of the shortcomings of earlier work. It's pretty scalable. The name is upon as a scalars a force that multiplies vectors. It's built with web standards and sustainability in mind. It interfaces with archives in interesting ways. It features a customizable API for more adventurous users, which allow projects to have a vectors like feel. We've seen really good uptake in university classrooms in libraries in museums in some university presses. We now have tens of thousands of users. Many different installs of Scalar exist in other locations, including Harvard the Newberry library different presses. We are available on GitHub and do other spaces for a community of users to help us build out the software. Thousands of projects have been built in Scalar of a number of kinds and the platform and its uses continue to evolve. When it loses and the quirky aesthetics of vectors and I do find those things to be losses. It makes up for the certain robustness. As with vectors we offer we internally try to support projects that engage issues of race of gender of social justice, but the platform can be used for myriad purposes across and beyond the humanities. The group brings together a large group of participants from our core development team that grew out of Scalar to a number of institutions archives and presses that have worked with us at different points in time. We've been lucky to have funding from Mellon and from any age that helped to sustain the projects and the kinds of projects that happened are multiple they don't they don't find a single form. This piece is an anthology in digital form. It's open access. It includes both an archive of an activist organization called third world majority of its early work with youth in digital media, as well as a series of essays and interviews undertaken by scholars that help frame that archive in particular ways. So it's a kind of hybrid project spanning archive and edited volume. The classroom use of Scalar has probably been one of its most substantial use cases. This is a project from Penn that brought together archival materials from the library with a small freshman seminar and the students collectively produced this project, the voyages of the Clarins over the course of a semester. The Newberry library has been a very exciting and robust partner for Scalar and they've adopted some widgets which allow open transcription of materials they hold in the library for their community of users and have begun to train interns to work with them on the projects as well. They maintain their own install of Scalar. Digital Paxton is a critical addition and teaching platform that bring together a vast array of resources, collecting material from several different collections and archives into one digital interface, allowing a greater spread of information about a particular historical incident that exists in any given library or institution on its own. Presses are using Scalar in a variety of ways. This project launched this month and illustrates new capacity we've built into Scalar to support 3D models. And it's published by Stanford Press and was undertaken by Elaine Sullivan. The University of Illinois library is also using Scalar to support a number of digital projects. Scalar has been used for digital dissertations at this project Redshift and Portal Metal by Misha Cardenas. And using the API, our creative director Eric Lawyer and his collaborator Evan Bissell have done a number of projects which have a more experimental interface and take us back to the kind of shape of older vectors projects. The software that underpins Scalar was born of frustrations we saw scholars having working with traditional database tools. So if vectors engaged political and feminist work at the level of content and through integrating form and content, Scalar actually tries to learn these lessons at the level of technological design. So we tried to integrate things we had learned from 15 years of working with progressive feminist scholars into the actual design of Scalar software. And in the book that Cliff mentioned, Feminist in the Software Lab, I make an argument that the software itself is feminist, not its uses, but its actual design. And I'm not going to go into that here, but I'd be happy to talk about that some in Q&A. We are now experimenting with how we might build new spaces, spaces that encourage making iteration and remaking, learning those lessons from feminist film theory and have located Scalar within the new Amundsen Lab at the USC Libraries. It's a project of the Sydney Harmon Academy of Polymathic Study, a space I direct, and it has a strong focus on hybrid undergrad education. With the ground, on the ground leadership from director Curtis Fletcher, we host a series of events that teach the use of digital tools within the context of social and cultural issues and fund vectors like research projects for faculty and student research teams. We also host, hopefully this summer, we're not quite sure now with the crisis, summer institutes for librarians and universities to send folks to campus in teams to learn to use the platform. Looking at the labs website, it seems less overtly feminist than our vectors projects did, even as I know that, as with Scalar, feminism is in there. Nonetheless, I think it's worth noting that along the path from vectors to Scalar to the lab. The mark of feminism becomes less overtly visible in many of our efforts. Our greater stability and institutionalization runs the risk of blunting our feminist and progressive force in building funded spaces and institutional support. I think this is a risk we have to be aware of and to grapple with. We're going to do so honestly and often in the lab, and we've learned other lessons as well. First, undertakings like vectors or Scalar surface real tensions between two conflicting scholarly impulses, a desire for experimentation and a need for continuity. Innovation is surfaced frequently for our team over the years with extensive discussion sintering on how to balance innovation with stability. We frequently hear from scholars who were keen to develop unique multimedia formats for their scholarship, and I'm sure many of you do as well, hoping to merge in arguments content and its expression in original ways. We're often seeking vectors like interfaces that uniquely suit their own materials, yet traditional mechanisms of peer review established publication formats and existing library infrastructure are still not well structured to support these one off efforts. This role as a site for continuity and stability and as a trusted agent for preservation mitigates against the impulse to experiment with new technologies within scholarly communication and research in the humanities. How might new forms of scholarship be vetted distributed and preserved how would they be understood. We're still struggling with answers to these questions 20 years later. Even as we have seen emerging forms take root like the video essay or podcast or robust 3D models questions about scalability sustainability and preservation still remain a second theme that emerged across many years of production concerned the value of failure. While it has become commonplace to extoll the virtues of failure few within the Academy actually lead with discussions of when things break and what went wrong. As I promoted vectors and then scalar and venues like CNI or ARL or the MLA it behooved me to highlight our successes and the platform. It's really hard to have an honest conversation about what has not worked and the many challenges we faced scalar received funding as part of its ongoing as the Mellon foundations ongoing effort to transform university presses and the scholarly monograph. And I would say we mostly failed here progress has been very uneven. Some press presses have embraced changed more openly, but others have not. The connection between presses has been very hard to engineer as presses actually work well in a model when they compete with each other for projects and distinguish themselves from one another. We've instead seen presses more interested in developing their own in house platforms and then in a shared ecosystem. While a publishing tool like scalar has seen greater uptake in the class in classrooms libraries and museums than within university presses, even if that was the original audience for the platform when we first began to build it. Mellon has funded a number of related platforms, some developed by presses and libraries, but it's very unlikely that these platforms will all be in sustained use and another 10 or 20 years. We've seen how hard it is to sustain platforms as we've continued to support and extend scalar over the years. Our funding comes from a complex and ever shifting patchwork of grants USC resources and partnerships. Because scalar is a platform largely used by those outside of USC. It's sometimes hard for the university to see it as a USC project. My development team is very small. We began vectors and scalar as research experiments to see what we could learn about screen aesthetics and digital networks. Now that scalar has grown from experiment to relatively stable platform, its needs really outstrip the DIY spirit that we began with and that many of my team most love. The three S's security support and sustainability are constant and ongoing issues that we navigate as best we can, but are always navigating with some degree of precarity. In attempting to address them, it sometimes feels like we lose sight of the creative elements that drew us to these projects in the first place. These transition points are hard and real. They require new forms of university support and cross institutional collaborations. Yet despite these tensions, strains and failures, we also know that projects like scalar and vectors offer rich objects to think with and through, bringing together scholars, publishers, librarians, technologists, administrators and others in collaboration and dialogue. The conversations shift the imagination of those involved, producing new insights and new possibilities, foaming change, I hope, long after the conversations have moved on and the platforms have ended. Such projects also put a spotlight on the importance of cultivating leadership as the humanities address the challenges and opportunities in the shifting technological landscape. I have long valued C&I in this regard, librarians and others at my first C&I meeting, shortly after Vectors launched, helped me understand the many things we were doing wrong and how we might address them. In creating a model that regularly brings diverse communities together, C&I highlights rich dialogue and crucial forms of collaboration. Scholars pursuing wacky edge projects gain wise counsel from librarians, IT specialists, policymakers and funders. Conversations across different fields and institutions help surface shared problems and help us see the terrain for intervention. It's probably not an accident that the dual embrace of theory and practice in feminist film communities in the 1970s came at a time of widespread changes in communication technologies. From the advent of cheaper, more portable cameras to the broad diffusion of television. The feminists that gathered to discuss feminist film in places like Edinburgh and the late 1970s understood their moment as a time to intervene in systems of production, representation, distribution and exhibition, working on many fronts and through many modalities. They valued theory and practice, but they held the two in lively tension. The digital technologies of our own era call us to embrace similar strategies as we confront the diffusion of the digital through our dreams, our lives and our platforms. Thank you. Thank you, Tara. That was amazing. Just an astounding reflection on, you know, an arc of 40 years or more and the interplay of technology, communications, social movements really so much there. I'd like to, well, first I'd like to just say thanks again and there's big applause showing up in the chat. One of the really frustrating things about about doing these by video is that there's no good way to generate a huge round of applause, but know that it's happening. Let's throw it open for questions and I see we've got one already. The question, the question speaks to what constitutes feminist software design. I kind of left myself open for that one, didn't I? It's, I mean that both as a metaphor and as a technological structure. So on the one hand, the process of designing the software came from a decade of very deep in meshing with scholars who wanted to achieve particular kinds of goals. So the prototype for scalar was a middleware platform Craig Dietrich built for building vectors projects and those projects were very committed to a kind of horizontal alignment of certain ideas to allow less hierarchical structures that derived both from ideas and feminist theory and intersectional work and from our own model of collaborative practice. So in building scalar Craig Dietrich and Eric lawyer wrapped a very weird implementation of a semantic layer around a database structure, which allows scalar to perform in odd ways that make it very different than wordpress. So well, if you're reading a scalar project, it doesn't feel that different than an online project like wordpress. The technological underpinnings of scalar allow a kind of radical flattening where the platform itself understands an equivalency between the different parts. So a media file, a tag, a page, a block of text, a path build pad isn't in scalar are all functionally equivalent in the structure of the platforms technology. So that attempt to build and model a technological platform that understood hierarchy is one of the ways I see the platform functioning technologically as a piece of technology that has learned lessons from feminist theory. But I never put that in a grant application. We have time for a few more questions. I just want to share this one. This is one of where it's from. And this is Don waters who was instrumental in in the melon foundations participation in so much of the, the arc of work you've described and he just, he just says thank you so much for taking time for these reflections. And that one I just thought you really appreciate. We have a question here. That's kind of a little bit related to one that I was also going to ask the question that's come in is, would you say a little more about how you envision building a shared ecology for scholarly communication. A lot of people who are making an argument to do this but often it seems that what that means is that they should abandon their projects and adopt mine. I mean, it's, I actually think it's a very hard thing to do. I mean, the larger kind of framework for scalar was the Alliance for networking visual culture, which was meant to be that ecology of scholarly sites like humanity centers, archives and libraries and presses working together. And that human infrastructure was very hard for us to build and sustain. I think that scalar has managed to build a relationship to fellow travelers that has benefited us and the fellow travelers One of our models right now for funding is to be written into grants with partners where we'll extend a portion of scalars functionality or add new features in partnership with institutions who need that feature in a particular way. So, about a year ago, we released a whole suite of editing functionality within saw in within scalar that we developed with the University of California and Stanford presses to allow peer review to happen in scalar so you could Before a project went live have editorial control over copy editing but also forms of peer review. The project that Stanford has just released that features 3D models is another of those partnerships where we worked with a community of scholars who's worked 3D heavily to figure out how scalar support those models when we hadn't been able to do that before. So, you know, we're also on GitHub and occasionally we receive kind of good kind of code back from folks. But, you know, that's not as robust as you know an original dream might have imagined it to be. So I think those, you know, scholarly ecosystems are hard to build in institutions that need to own their own creative own and promote their own creativity. Right. So I have continued conversations with both my Dean and the senior leadership at my university about why they should fund scalar at all if it's mostly used at other universities right there's a kind of territoriality that I think really works against kind of the shared ecosystems we would like to build. Yeah. If I could maybe take our the question we got in a little farther and speak to another aspect of shared ecologies. One of the things I see with a lot of these platforms that are that have grown up. And this is not specific to scalar but to other platforms as well is that we often don't focus much on the ability to move things from one platform to another to import and export to have kind of content interoperability or interchange. Could you maybe say a little about the extent to which scalar thinks about that. One of the real lessons we learned from the community at CNI moving from vectors to scalar so that you know the flash projects and vectors were sort of hermetically sealed within the world of flash and you know I still don't think anybody has a really good answer for what's going to happen to all this flash projects including ours right you know I think you know some emulators are being built that might help but scalar was designed from the outset so that you could export the content in a variety of formats that might reasonably play forward right and you might lose the ability to kind of retain a lot of what the structure and the material was was still there. The one big absence there is that scalar is not a media server so all of the media files that are in scalar unless they're a very small size are not contained in the scalar project they're linked to from outside. So we Craig built a way to document the the kind of provenance and data around those objects at the moment of importing something into scalar so that wrapper that lets you know what the object was where it came from you know ideally a thumbnail is still there even if the object itself goes missing through link rot or you know other forms of kind of exporting the data and that decision to not have the objects in the scalar projects was partially to not become a huge media server but more importantly to kind of adjudicate claims around copyright and what could go into a project and still publish it without rights or permissions right because the projects are not the pieces of media the images are not actually in scalar so you could publish a scalar project and not be publishing those more contested objects. That may ultimately help with the preservability of the objects to I mean, I leave the, you know, many of these kinds of long term questions about preservation and sustainability to kind of, you know, quicker minds than mine to help us figure out because that's not a strength of our team and I think that's, you know, questions like preservation and sustainability and ADA compliance, you know, these things are hard for small teams to grapple with the at the moment they're also building, but really important to be thinking about as you're building so that you make the best choices you can and how you build. Yeah, we could take I think maybe one more question. I think you may have just blown everybody away. Tara, that was just wonderful. Thank you so very much.