Introduction
The use of digital and interactive pedagogy has been growing in higher education as students and faculty become more fluent with digital technologies and open to experimentation. The shift to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in 2020 and peaked in 2021, accelerated this process (Rosenblum and Ross 2022; Scida 2022). This article presents one case study of applying digital and interactive pedagogy in a college classroom by describing a project that led to a collective student publication on Scalar, a humanities-centered platform that can draw visual, sonic, and textual materials together (Sharkey 2023).
The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (ANVC), the developer and sponsor of Scalar, describes the platform as a route to achieving “media-rich scholarly publishing that's as easy as blogging” (The Alliance of Networking Visual Culture, "About Scalar" n.d.). Our experience convinced us that Scalar is an easy-to-use and elegant platform that presents rich opportunities for interactive pedagogy and collaborative scholarship. Students can link and nest sections or chapters around a common theme to generate a book-length work that functions like an edited volume. However, while our experiences with Scalar were positive, we could issue three cautions to educators who are considering a project like this one. First, creating and publishing our Scalar site with students required extensive oversight and invisible labor for faculty and institutional liaisons, suggesting that it may not be optimal for educators at under-resourced institutions who are “teaching [digital humanities] on a shoestring” (Savonick 2022). Second, publishing students’ work on Scalar raised questions that had legal dimensions. We discuss these concerns, related to privacy and consent, more fully below. Third, publishing a student-centered site like this one can have reputational considerations and consequences for instructors and institutions. If a site goes public, then its quality and substance may reflect on its sponsors. This simple fact suggests that one should aim for a site that is not just good, but excellent. It should be free of misspelled words and clumsy grammar or punctuation. Its facts should be solid. And it should comply with copyright in order to shield the host institution from liability.
Those who are not worried about pushback from colleagues or senior administrators, or who do not need or want to count this project as a form of public scholarship and credential for the sake of promotion, may be willing to associate their name with a somewhat less polished site.1 Once found, a published site may generate criticism and commentary from scholars and members of broader global audiences who are invested in the material. We therefore advise instructors and editors to recognize that a digital publication like this one is “real” and carries weight, and to apply quality-control standards to the degree that seems appropriate. In our case, we tried to make the site more professional and discoverable after publication by securing a digital object identifier (DOI), adding a “Terms of Use” page with a recommended citation, and generating a Creative Commons license. These enhancements enabled us to reach our higher goal, which is to have the publication engage with and add to other forms of multimedia scholarship that address the food history of the Middle East and of diasporic Sephardic Jewish communities.
In what follows we describe more fully what we did and outline challenges we faced. We make a case for setting clear pedagogical goals and priorities, building training sessions into the course plan, and articulating—and repeating—policies to students. We discuss institutional roadblocks that appeared after we finished this project and that prevented us from repeating this experiment with another cohort. We are convinced that many of the challenges and concerns we faced—including questions about digital fragility (that is, how and for how long the site will last)—are not specific to Scalar and may bear upon other modes of digital pedagogy and collaborative student-centered publishing in institutions of higher learning. Finally, we advance suggestions to educators who are contemplating an assignment like this one, in large or small classes, according to variable resources.
Readers should note that our use of the plural noun, “instructors,” and plural pronoun, “we,” is a conscious choice in describing authorship. We write this article as the professor who offered the class (a historian of the Middle East and North Africa, and expert on Food Studies), and as the specialist in digital publishing (a postdoctoral fellow in the university library and scholar of Italian Studies), who previously developed a Scalar site. While the professor led students in doing research and producing content, the digital publishing specialist offered training and guided design. Our use of first-person plural pronouns also gestures towards the other library specialists who advised us on structuring assignments, troubleshooting with coding, and implementing publication. This plural form recognizes, too, the energy, activity, and scholarship that students put into the project—and the importance of the students as authors. In short, developing this Scalar site was a team effort from beginning to end.
Teaching Goals and Project Challenges: A Preliminary Overview
In Spring 2023, thirteen undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania worked across the semester to produce a multimodal digital publication on the platform called Scalar. They pursued this project in a seminar that surveyed the history of food in the Middle East from ancient times to the present and that also covered diasporic communities in the United States. They focused on one text, a Middle Eastern American community cookbook, and wrote about the history of particular dishes, their ingredients, and the people who made them. Assignments also required students, working in assigned teams, to prepare recipes from the text while taking photographs, making short videos, and recording recipes to reflect modifications.
This project began with a few teaching goals. The first was to engage students in producing open-access digital humanities scholarship while strengthening their skills in researching, writing, and presenting ideas. The second, which addressed students’ needs in the post-COVID educational landscape, aimed to develop camaraderie through teamwork—enabling students to socialize while mitigating feelings of isolation that many reported2 while “building an identity cohort.”3 The third aimed to deepen the students’ engagement with the Middle East—a part of the world with which few of them claimed much prior knowledge—by sending them on “culinary adventures” that entailed cooking in their apartments or residence-hall kitchens while experimenting with ingredients (such as rose water) or techniques (such as making yeasted bread) that were new to them. These cooking activities involved touching, smelling, tasting, seeing, and hearing (as in the sound of onions sizzling in a pot), and literally got them moving.
The Scalar project became an exercise in interactive pedagogy by involving students in producing collaborative, high-quality, digital, and public-facing scholarship while learning by doing, in multisensory, experiential, and “embodied” (hands-on and physically active) ways. The aim, in toto, was to build students’ confidence in their abilities, promote joy through learning, and create memorable experiences to enrich their lives (Nathan 2022).
This Scalar project culminated in a digital publication, Food in the Islamic Middle East: A Case Study of the Sephardic Heritage Cookbook, that was substantive, easy to use, and beautiful to look at. Students reported pride in what they achieved. And yet, taking this project to a publishable state posed challenges for the instructor, the digital publishing expert, and the other library specialists who helped. Strikingly, it may have been less onerous for the students, whose responsibilities ended once they completed and uploaded assignments and moved on at semester’s end.
Developing the Scalar project posed challenges by requiring:
- active project management by the instructor, who created a very detailed syllabus—a roadmapwith a week-by-week plan to account for training and for allocating individual and team tasks in developing content. (Note that once explained, and possibly re-explained, Scalar is easy to use, but its functions are not immediately intuitive. Building training into class time ensured that all students knew what to do.)
- meticulous attention to copyright, especially for images. Explaining the basics of copyright law in class helped students to appreciate what was appropriate, as did pointing them to media that they could use from elsewhere (e.g., photographs on Wikimedia Commons that had Creative Commons licenses). We highlighted the value of creating content themselves such as by using their phones to take photographs of the food that they made, and then uploading the images to Scalar to avoid copyright infringements.
- meticulous attention to copy editing texts for punctuation, spelling, and grammar, while avoiding jargon and writing simply with a broad public in mind. We spent time in class discussing “readability” (Arya 2018), with the instructor recommending that students imagine intelligent and curious middle-school readers as targets. We built peer editing assignments into the syllabus, with mixed results (more on that below). Additionally, the instructor suggested content-based and stylistic edits to every student submission, and did a final round of copy editing on all texts before publishing the site.
- consideration of privacy and a policy regarding digital authorship, while thinking about how best to protect students from potential surveillance or exploitation in a “datafied world” (Pangrazio and Sefton-Green 2021). More on this point below.
- a strong support network linking the instructor to at least one campus expert who could help with nuts-and-bolts issues of adding material to Scalar or formatting it.
We will elaborate on these challenges more fully after describing the project and the assignments that generated content. We will also reflect on ways of using Scalar in bigger classes or in institutions with fewer resources for technical and library support.
Describing the Project: Learning from The Sephardic Heritage Cookbook and Devising Assignments
The course that produced this Scalar publication, called “Food in the Islamic Middle East: History, Memory, Identity,” included thirteen upper-class students (juniors and seniors) who met once a week, in person, for three-hour sessions. Students also worked independently outside class to complete assignments. The course assumed no prior background in Middle Eastern or Food Studies, although it did give priority in enrollment to participants in an honors-style program for students from across the university’s four undergraduate schools (Business, Nursing, Engineering, and Arts & Sciences) who had strong academic records and interest in interdisciplinary studies beyond their degree programs (Center for Undergraduate Research & Fellowships n.d.). Many of these students reported at the start of the semester that they had written few if any research papers before, so they approached assignments with some trepidation. Nevertheless, the small size of the seminar and the students’ demonstrated intellectual commitment positioned them to succeed.
The professor, Heather Sharkey, had never used Scalar before. But she had offered a class on Middle Eastern food history for several years running, so the course content was not new. She had also begun in 2019 to involve students in writing original course-related articles for Wikipedia while partnering with the Wiki Education Foundation, which promotes participation and equity in Wikipedia among North American college students (Wiki Education Foundation n.d.). This foundation’s student program provides online tutorials that teach students how to edit and write for Wikipedia. Tutorials also guide students on topics ranging from finding and citing appropriate sources to avoiding plagiarism and heeding ethical guidelines when writing about living persons (Blumenthal et al. 2021). From her experiences of teaching via the Wiki Edu Student Program, Sharkey became committed to two pedagogical approaches that she brought to this Scalar initiative: first, working in teams to research, draft, and contribute original content; and second, producing public-facing scholarship (Sharkey 2020) and modeling “digital citizenship” by creating and sharing knowledge online (Mossberger et al. 2008).
The idea of pursuing a collaborative, semester-long, digital publication initially arose in conversations with a scholar who was involved in a “Digital Judaica” initiative to promote students’ use of materials from the Jewish Studies-related collections of the university library (the Penn Libraries).4 Sharkey was intrigued by the suggestion. Planning to teach her food history seminar, and knowing that the Penn Libraries had some strong cookbook collections (ranging from old and rare manuscripts to hot-off-the-press popular imprints), she suggested choosing a Sephardic cookbook, from a Middle Eastern American Jewish community, as the focus. She found several options in the library’s collections, including two mid-twentieth-century works from the genre known as community cookbooks5 which the library was able to digitize. Ultimately, however, Sharkey selected a much more recent cookbook, which the library owned.
The cookbook she chose was The Sephardic Heritage Cookbook: Ottoman, Persian, Moroccan, Egyptian Recipes and More, published in 2017 by the women’s society, the Or Chadash Sisterhood, of Temple Tifereth Israel in Los Angeles (Sephardic Temple Or Chadash Sisterhood 2016). This book had several qualities that commended its use for this class. First, it was available for purchase online at a reasonable price so that students who wanted a copy could get one. (Note that all other assigned readings in the class were digital excerpts from books and articles posted on a Canvas site according to fair-use guidelines, so that students faced no other costs for buying books.) Second, the compilers of the cookbook included vignettes at the start of most recipes, explaining the cultural significance of each dish (e.g., its role in a particular holiday), or telling a story about the person who made it or where the person’s family had come from. In other words, the makers of this cookbook had a strong historical consciousness, as the word “heritage” in their title suggested. They were also conscious of trying to appeal to a younger generation within their congregation who might not know much about their community’s history and food traditions. Their explanatory tone made this book ideal for our students, none of whom had much direct knowledge of Sephardic customs and some of whom had little knowledge of Jewish culture in general. Third, the contributors traced family connections to many parts of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean world via recipes that reflected adaptations to American or more specifically Californian contexts (for example, by incorporating relatively new or “non-traditional” ingredients, such as chocolate or quinoa, into some dishes). In this way the recipes mapped global migrations and food trends. Fourth, the cookbook contained many photographs and gave instructions that were simple and clear, making the recipes genuinely “cookable” for novice chefs. Fifth and finally, despite its cultural specificities (through its association with a Middle Eastern American Sephardic Jewish congregation in Los Angeles), the cookbook fit broader patterns common to American community cookbooks. These commonalities made it possible for the professor to assign comparative readings about this fascinating literary genre and social phenomenon, which, as many historians have noted, can track long-running social, economic, and political shifts in U.S. culture at large.6
A bonus of using The Sephardic Heritage Cookbook is that, because the book was so new, its creators were still active in their community. Sharkey contacted the temple to tell them about the proposed project and received an enthusiastic response. The students were able to talk to three of the compilers during one class, by Zoom, and two students subsequently interviewed them for oral histories. From speaking to these authors, we learned more about their reasons for producing the cookbook. They told us about how their demographics had changed in the past fifty years. The congregation’s founding families had come to the United States from Mediterranean or Balkan backgrounds, from places like Izmir in Turkey, or Alexandria in Egypt, where many Jews spoke Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish. Many newer members, however, came to greater Los Angeles as exiles following the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979, and were Persian Jews who spoke Farsi. The foods of the respective groups varied a lot: for example, the Mediterranean and Balkan Sephardic Jews were fond of savory pastries like boyos and burekas, whereas the Iranian Jews favored rice pilafs. Holiday customs (such as what people made for Passover) varied, too. A goal of the cookbook, its compilers explained, was to bring different members of their congregation together through mutual appreciation for food.
The Sephardic Heritage Cookbook worked well for a class like this one that had a historical focus. Thinking about a digital publication as the target of a semester-long project, the instructor devised three assignments to generate content: two short essays and a team-based cooking project. She kept the essays short (650–750 words, about three pages double spaced) and urged students to focus on quality and originality, not length. Before each assignment, the instructor circulated guidelines and a preliminary list of topics; students brainstormed together and then signed up for particular topics, as a way of avoiding duplication. Together the class also discussed ways of finding and citing appropriate sources, and crafting narratives.
The first essay asked students to focus on the cookbook’s cultural and historical context. Students ended up writing, for example, about the community cookbook as a literary genre, the congregation that produced it, and the history of particular Middle Eastern and North African Jewish communities. Some wrote about Jewish or specifically Sephardic culinary customs: for instance, what makes some wine qualify as kosher, or what foods have special associations with Nowruz (Persian New Year), which marks the Spring equinox, and which Jews from Iran historically celebrated in tandem with their Muslim and other neighbors.
The second essay asked students to write about the history of individual ingredients used in the cookbook, such as saffron and pomegranates. This assignment introduced students to methods of microhistory (Magnusson and Szijarto 2013) while encouraging them to consider changes over time in dietary practices and access to foods. A few students, for example, wrote about modern leavening agents, making it possible to ask how “traditional” the cookbook’s recipe for Persakhe Kurdish fried bread, made by Jews in the western Iranian city of Sanandaj, could actually be, if British and American chemists only invented baking powder in the mid-nineteenth century. Another student wrote about rue (a herb used in some foods, as in a kind of marzipan candy prepared for weddings, bar mitzvahs, and the like), to which some Sephardic Jews (along with their Muslim or Christian neighbors) attributed the power of averting the evil eye.
Having worked with students, several years before, to create a curated digital exhibit on the Omeka platform, Sharkey knew how much time and effort it might take to ensure that students’ work would reach standards for publication in content, coherence, and literary style. Hoping to reduce the labor to vet and edit students’ work, she built peer revision into the syllabus. She required students to submit drafts of essays and to copy edit each other’s work. She used the Collaborations feature on the course’s Canvas site and, advised by Bruhns Alonso, who had done something similar before, created a form that students could fill out to assess each other’s work. But a challenge arose, which resembled a “teaching fail” that Kimon Keramidas has described regarding a course he taught to doctoral students in CUNY Graduate Center’s Certificate Program in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy: namely, students proved “hesitant (or in some cases unwilling) to make the leap to the type of collaborative writing that would overcome ingrained deference to original authors” (2012). To be clear, in this class at Penn, students seemed open to the theory of peer reviewing. But in practice they seemed nervous about hurting each others’ feelings or were uncertain about how to edit—not having had much practice with revision—with the result that they suggested improvements that were often superficial. The result was that the load of suggesting revisions for content, structure, and style–along with final copy editing–fell on the instructor after all. Moreover, while peer editing exercises had the advantage for students of giving them graded but “low-stakes” assignments, it had the disadvantage for the instructor of requiring close oversight (and assessment) without necessarily yielding essays that were ready to “go.”
By contrast, the experiential cooking assignment was a resounding success. At the suggestion of colleagues in the university library,7 the instructor designed the assignment in ways that worked smoothly and left students enthused. First, she circulated a brief questionnaire, in advance, about students’ dietary needs, preferences, food sensitivities, and scheduling constraints. Their responses informed team assignments. Thus, for example, the student who could not cook on the Sabbath (Friday night or Saturday daytime) and who kept kosher was teamed with a Nursing student whose rotation schedule in the university hospital meant that she could only cook on a weeknight from Monday through Thursday. Second, the instructor encouraged teams to choose recipes that would be relatively cheap and easy to make with minimal equipment. Third, she led students on a field trip by walking together at the end of class one day to a Middle Eastern grocery store that was just beyond the university, where they were able to find some ingredients (such as ground cardamom) for what they had decided to make. This grocery-store visit entailed active learning and community engagement, or what some scholars have called “deliberative pedagogy,” for the sake of promoting mutual respect and understanding (Long et al. 2017). Meanwhile, the team cooking activity, which occurred outside of class, exposed students to a new cuisine and fostered esprit de corps and commensality (Jönssen et al. 2021), that is, social communion achieved by eating together. Finally, this cooking assignment generated content for the Scalar site. Teams had to supply and post a copy of the recipe, reflecting any modifications they made; a vignette to describe their dish; and a video clip and images of their process and the results.
Why Scalar? Technical Considerations in Choosing the Platform
These were details of content. Equally critical was the platform which is where Scalar came in. Late in 2022, as plans for the class were developing and the new semester was poised to start, Cosette Bruhns Alonso joined the Penn Libraries as a contemporary publishing fellow and agreed to advise Sharkey on planning the project. In the previous year, Bruhns Alonso had taught at Brown University, where she engaged students in a mixed graduate-undergraduate seminar that built a multimodal Scalar site. Her positive experiences with Scalar led her to recommend this platform over WordPress, which another colleague had suggested.
Developed as a scholarly authoring tool by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, Scalar allows users to juxtapose media and text in various formats without requiring much technological expertise. Scalar allows for easy assembly of components into essay and book length forms of digital writing that can include nested elements while looking sleek and vivid. Scalar has the further advantage of allowing collaborative editing of content within the platform itself. By contrast, another platform that might have been a good option, namely, Manifold (a collaboration between the University of Minnesota Press, CUNY Graduate Center, and Cast Iron Coding), did not allow users to edit within its platform at that time. (A subsequent update to Manifold in late 2023 added this capability.) In short, for a relatively easy-to-use, collaboratively authored class publication which had the potential to be visually stunning, Bruhns Alonso recommended Scalar.
Scalar has a strong track record: both library publishers and university presses have adopted it for born-digital, media-rich scholarly publications. Its flexible format enables customization at different scales of technical expertise and complexity, depending on available resources. Scholars can advance an argument through the integration of media and text, without needing to know programming languages that could significantly alter the platform. Some recent publications that fully use Scalar’s ability to nest content and embed media include those published within the Publishing Without Walls’ African American Studies series, a Mellon Foundation-funded initiative led by University of Illinois Libraries with campus partners and with the University of Illinois Press, University of Michigan Press, and University of Minnesota Press. Author Kenton Rambsy, Associate Professor of African American Literature at the University of Texas at Arlington, has published two titles within the series: #TheJayZMixtape, as an individual author, and collaboratively with Peace Ossom-Williamson, Lost in the City: An Exploration of Edward P. Jones’ Short Fiction. Both publications include numerous video files and interactive visualizations that required specialized knowledge or a team effort to create and edit outside of the platform. In terms of embedding them within the Scalar publication, there were no additional customizations required for this series, meaning that the technical requirements for assembly remained impressively minimal, despite their visual sophistication.
A major challenge posed when embedding links and media files is ensuring a site’s long-term function and preservation given the potential that digital materials have for “radical obsolescence.” As Fernando Domínguez Rubio and Glenn Wharton have noted, digital creations are embedded in “hardware, platforms, and infrastructures” that are vulnerable to change and dependent on much more labor, expertise, and money than people tend to assume, thereby making questions of preservation quite urgent (2020).8 One could frame this problem in terms of “digital fragility” as opposed to “digital sustainability.”
Jasmine Mulliken, Production and Preservation Manager at Stanford University Press (SUP), which published heavily customized born-digital monographs using Scalar between 2018 and 2023, grappled with related issues while writing extensively on preservation methods for SUP’s digital publications (Mulliken 2021). She described the preservation stage of the project as more of “an iterative one, involving collaborations not only with the author and development team, but also with copy editors, catalogers, designers, accessibility specialists, and web archivists (Mulliken 2023).” While acknowledging these challenges, she praised Scalar for allowing customizations that illustrate the complex scale of creation, authoring, and preservation that a digital publication can assume while still achieving a media-rich and visually arresting outcome. For a technically sophisticated example, which shows Scalar’s power and range and which includes embedded 3-D simulations, one can look to a 2022 Stanford University Press publication, Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World by Massimo Riva, Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University, which Riva and SUP developed in collaboration with Brown University Digital Publications.
Although not intended solely for pedagogical use, the interactivity of Rambsy and Riva’s publications in Scalar aimed to promote cross-disciplinary conversations and advance the integration of media and text in scholarly monographs. As open access publications, they appealed to diverse audiences, within and beyond academia. While works of similar resource-based complexity are unlikely to be practical as projects in college classrooms (which have the added constraint of working on very fixed timelines), they can nevertheless offer inspiration—a high benchmark—for more modest initiatives.
Bruhns Alonso was aware of these ambitious Scalar publications when she decided to use the platform for a project in a mixed undergraduate and graduate course at Brown University in Spring 2022, entitled “Decameron: Technologies of Representation, Medieval to Modern.” Students pursued projects investigating The Decameron, the collection of Italian stories by the fourteenth-century writer Giovanni Boccaccio. Given the pedagogical aim of analyzing multiple renditions, formats, and representations of The Decameron via text, audio, image, or video, Scalar’s modular and non-linear design options provided an ideal space where students could explore relationships between the media, engage in comparative textual and visual analysis, and produce interdisciplinary research. The platform cultivated skills at the intersection of literacy, technology, and scholarly communication by prompting students to consider copyright, media permissions, file formats, audience navigation, and metadata creation. Scalar’s low learning curve made it possible to focus on creating content since coding was not an obstacle.
Yet while this Scalar project on The Decameron at Brown successfully met teaching and learning goals, the site remained password-protected at the end of the semester and did not culminate in publication as an open access resource. Bruhns Alonso realized that it would not be possible to publish the work because some students had analyzed and included copyrighted media files within their projects. Theoretically, at the outset of the course, she could have advised students to avoid copyrighted media—but this would have significantly constrained their ability to use the range of materials that were critical to the course’s intellectual foundations (such as a 1971 Italian film based on Boccacio’s text). She also had concerns about guidelines for publishing student work. These two challenges, related to permissions and privacy, ultimately posed more of a deterrent to publishing than learning how to use Scalar itself.
Little Challenges and Big Ones: The Learning Curve, Publishing, Permissions, and Privacy
Instructors and scholarly publishing professionals have described Scalar as an “excellent vehicle for student learning, if educators can navigate its complexity” (Gilman et al 2020)9 While its basic authoring function and mechanisms for uploading media are fairly standard and resemble other blog or digital publishing environments, Scalar’s authoring features for implementing metadata, annotations, and nesting or tagging text and media require guided use of the platform. Nevertheless, we found that students in the Spring 2023 seminar at Penn did not have many questions about learning the platform and figured out how to add text and embed media fairly quickly. To facilitate use, Bruhns Alonso visited Sharkey’s classroom multiple times to lead tutorials in addition to holding office hours. (These tutorials turned out to be necessary because, while formatting materials on the Scalar site was not difficult, it could be fiddly and was not always intuitive.) She also joined Sharkey and the students for conversations about copy editing, peer reviewing, and finding media and images in the public domain. This last area, about copyright and media permissions, was where the students needed the most advice.
Introducing students to digital scholarly publishing presented an opportunity to engage them in conversations about doing research, writing for interdisciplinary and public audiences, and working collaboratively. We found that the students were eager to discuss each other’s writing and to collaborate on different phases of the publication, although the distribution of their comments and attention was uneven. This was most apparent in the peer review part of the project, which aimed to foster dialogue and teamwork while producing texts that contained smooth prose, strong content, and appropriate citations. Because students were not used to revising drafts or hesitated to seem critical of each other, peer editing did not yield essays that were publication ready, and required more oversight and feedback from Sharkey.
Another obstacle for developing a digital publication as a collaborative class project concerned student privacy. While some universities have flexible regulations for publishing student-authored work that is also graded for course credit, the University of Pennsylvania takes a rigid position. In the past, the university has not allowed faculty to require students to publish work in their own names. In fact, Sharkey encountered this policy in 2014 when she led students in developing an online exhibit on the Omeka platform. While all students wrote research papers, the papers that ultimately appeared on that site were only those for which students gave individual consent. Aware of this policy, during the months before Bruhns Alonso came to Penn, Sharkey conferred with two university’s library specialists to devise a policy that would comply with this requirement, on whichever platform it went. They agreed that the best choice would be not to include any names on individual essays—to preserve thereby the anonymity of the students. Because they expected that the peer review process (which was built into the assignments as set out on the syllabus) would lead to collaborative writing in ways that would blur authorship, they agreed that this policy would make sense. But ultimately, as described above, students suggested fewer edits on each other’s work than expected, so that authorship remained individual. Nevertheless, Sharkey discussed the policy with the students at the beginning of the semester. On more than one occasion, some students said that they wished that they could include their names – that is, they would have preferred not to be anonymous—so that they could cite their published work as a credential.
By semester’s end, most pieces of the Scalar site were in place. Sharkey did one last round of copy editing and asked students to review and approve suggested changes to their individual texts. She reorganized the essays on the Scalar website to ensure a rational flow, drawing on prior experience of publishing edited volumes and special issues of journals. She conferred with a few students to make sure that photographs which they had not taken themselves had appropriate Creative Commons licenses to allow their use. Reflecting the do-it-yourself nature of the project, to avoid copyright issues, and to give the constituent pages a unified look, Sharkey took photographs of old Persian rugs in her house to use as backgrounds for the students’ images of food. Most importantly, she wrote an introductory essay for the full site and a short introduction to the three main sections—features intended to make the collective work cohere like an edited volume by giving overviews for readers. Bruhns Alonso was instrumental in taking the final steps: she reviewed the site’s design, liaised with other library specialists on some last-minute troubleshooting in the coding, and secured a digital object identifier (DOI) to help with findability. Thanks to her efforts, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries published the site and cataloged it in its portal (“Franklin”), which made it “official.” It appeared as Food in the Islamic Middle East: A Case Study of the Sephardic Heritage Cookbook, in 2023.
Sharkey and Bruhns Alonso wanted to repeat the Scalar experience in Spring 2024, this time choosing a different text—a translated medieval Arabic cookbook—as the focus of the class project. They hoped to draw on lessons from Spring 2023 to fine-tune the approach, with another digital publication as the objective. But they could not proceed, because the University of Pennsylvania’s Office of Audit, Compliance, and Privacy advised them that the university’s Office of General Counsel needed first to approve a consent form—a form whose wording was still being reviewed, but which would require faculty to collect written authorization from each student (named or not) prior to publishing any content online.
The university announced this policy requirement after the publication of the student project from Sharkey’s Spring 2023 course—so, fortunately, that publication still stands. To repeat, Sharkey and Bruhns Alonso worked diligently to ensure privacy from the outset by not including students’ names in that publication.
And yet, just as there may be ethical reasons for withholding students’ names—notably, for the sake of protecting privacy—there are ethical factors associated with not naming students, too. First, as mentioned above, some students wanted to use their names on the Scalar site because they were proud of what they had done and were considering applying for graduate programs or jobs where they believed that their publication, if included on résumés, would work to their credit. Second, eliminating students’ names has the potential effect of making it seem that the project is singularly authored by the sponsoring faculty member, rather than a collaborative effort, which is once more a question of credit. An “About this Publication & Acknowledgments” page on the Scalar site emphasizes the class-project nature of this publication and the role of the students as authors but does not explicitly discuss the policy on withholding names—partly because Sharkey and Bruhns Alonso have not been sure about the best way to do so. This acknowledgements page also cites colleagues who helped with different aspects of the project.
We were disappointed that university authorities did not allow us to repeat our experiment and that they could not provide the approval form in synchrony with the academic year. We hope that the authorization forms that the university eventually produces will give students agency to elect to include or exclude their names, after considering options carefully in conversation with the instructor and in alignment with students’ career aspirations.
The student privacy issue outlined above may be specific to the University of Pennsylvania, located within the United States. We recognize that institutions nationally and globally will apply student privacy regulations differently, and advise others who may be considering a collaborative digital publication project to review relevant policies in their local contexts.
Navigating media permissions is another consideration for guiding students through an open access digital publication in Scalar or another platform. Although many instructors have included media in their own work published by university presses, they may not appreciate the extent to which they have benefitted from the expertise of publishers in securing image files and permissions. Likewise, they may not realize that they must provide compliance-oriented guidance to students as they locate media to embed in essays. If the end-goal of a project is an open access publication, one must scaffold into the course plan conversations about searching for media in the public domain, adding one’s own media to Wikimedia Commons with appropriate Creative Commons licenses, and assigning metadata and alt-text to media embedded in Scalar. If the aim is not to publish an open access project, but only to enable comparative analysis of multimodal content for internal use of a class, this decision might look different, such as in the case of Bruhns Alonso’s Decameron course. Either way, media permissions is a subject that instructors and students must confront. We found that devoting class time to discussing Scalar and publishing considerations and connecting these discussions to particular assignments were valuable in making the students conscious of their own roles as public intellectuals and digital citizens.
Advice for Instructors: Scaling Scalar, in Classes Small and Large
For educators who are considering pursuing a similar project with Scalar and who want to publish the results (as opposed to constructing a site only for internal, password-protected use) we have some concrete advice. Most of this advice applies whether the class is small or large, and whether the institution’s library and technical support resources are relatively extensive or limited.
Key advice, applicable to instructors in classes and institutions of all kinds, is the following:
- Know the academic content already.
Only embark on a Scalar project in a course you have taught before. Knowing the academic content will make the editing and the logistical and technical assembly less of a “heavy lift.”
- Consider the architecture of the site you want to build; devise a rough plan before the semester starts.
Just as you would have an outline in mind before writing a book or article, know broadly what kind of project you want to pursue. Have a rough sense of the table of contents or section headings before starting and structure assignments to generate content. Suggest topics to students, or brainstorm together, and ask them to sign up for or to commit to topics in advance to avoid replication of content. Share sample assignments as models. The bigger the class, the more important pre-planning will be.
- Make a detailed syllabus with clear instructions, benchmarks, and deadlines.
The syllabus will be as important for you, the instructor, as it will be for the students; it can keep everybody on track. Set out week-by-week reminders about what needs doing. A detailed syllabus will ease project management.
- Learn the basics of Scalar yourself; take a hands-on approach.
As the instructor, you should be comfortable with the rudiments of Scalar layout—posting, editing, and arranging content—so that you can offer basic help to students as needed. Either get basic training on Scalar in advance, or learn with the students.
- Show examples of Scalar sites or digital publications that integrate media and text.
Inspire students from the outset and give them a sense of how text, image, and sound can work in concert. The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture links some student sites on its website, from various institutions and classes. These models are not only helpful; they are realistic, as the outcome of semester-long projects ("Class Projects" n.d.).
- Line up a team and find partners, such as librarians or student interns, and ask them to learn Scalar as well.
Educators at well-resourced institutions may have access to experts in digital humanities, copyright and media use, and more. But in fact, all librarians possess critical skills in information literacy that can bolster a project like this one, for example, by helping students to find sources. The most important thing is to have supporters who can help with shepherding the project along, troubleshooting with formatting, and generally lending their eyes to the site as it develops. Good team members may also be graduate or advanced undergraduate students who can function as teaching assistants (TA’s) or research assistants while potentially bringing skills as bloggers or coding enthusiasts to the table. Valuable “project managers” could also be student interns who are detail- and deadline-oriented and comfortable with organizing and rallying peers. The bottom line is that having teammates will make the experience less scary and more fun.
- Establish clear learning goals and deadlines for project components; periodically remind students in class; and, again, set these out in the syllabus.
Outline goals of the Scalar project, with attention to how they relate to learning objectives such as research, writing, presenting, and appropriate use and citation of media. Inform students of the learning goals; set them out on the syllabus; and remind the students of goals as the semester goes on.
- Occasionally dedicate twenty or so minutes of “lab time” for learning and discussing Scalar during class.
Include time in class to learn Scalar together, browse other Scalar publications, and discuss design and editorial development. Periodic check-ins can give everybody a chance to raise questions and work through technical concerns while instilling confidence.
- Treat the students as colleagues.
Discuss stages of the publishing process with students—including revision, copyediting, and site design—so that they think of themselves as public intellectuals, digital scholars, and professionals who have high standards to reach and maintain, and who are doing a service by sharing their work. Encourage a culture of scholarly collaboration and collegiality by not only telling students what policies are (for example, on authorship and privacy), but also by explaining how they have come into being—thereby involving students in debates and heightening awareness of scholarly ethics.
- In all classes, but especially in big ones, keep text-based assignments short—maybe really short—and privilege quality over quantity.
For assignments, consider asking students to write only, say, 100– to 200–word captions for an image of their choosing, as for a digital exhibit. Keeping texts short will reduce the load of copy editing and facilitate quality control. For models of how to write effective captions for digital exhibits, instructors and students could look at the Instagram feeds of prominent museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Lê 2019). Stress the importance of literary style even for these very short texts: writing prose that is simple, jargon-free, and engaging. Urge them to keep a broad public in mind, perhaps by imagining a target audience of smart and curious middle-school students.
- Assess goals for post-publication discoverability and take steps to make it happen.
Consider these questions about goals for publication. How, and how easily, do you want students, colleagues, and public audiences to find the site once published? How prominently do you want to feature the names of the instructor(s) and the institutional home? Collaborate with librarians and technology staff at your institution, if possible, to develop a plan for cataloging the publication, adding a DOI, and sharing the project on relevant department or institution websites.
Conclusion: Missions Accomplished!
Producing this Scalar site entailed a major commitment in time and labor while forcing us to confront subtle questions about copyright and privacy. But the effort was worth it, and we (here meaning Sharkey and Bruhns Alonso, who led the team effort) have emerged energized from the experience and eager to do it again.
As a class project, Food in the Islamic Middle East: A Case Study of the Sephardic Heritage Cookbook, activated students’ research, writing, and presentation skills through a public digital humanities initiative. At the same time, it enhanced camaraderie and peer collaboration in the post-COVID educational landscape and deepened students’ cultural engagement with the Middle East and its culinary traditions. Scalar facilitated these achievements by providing an elegant digital environment through which the students could share experiences and learn together. We consider the project a success on grounds that are at once scholarly, pedagogical, and aesthetic.
Beyond the pedagogical and interactive aims that this project achieved, we are delighted that elements like the DOI associated with our publication will ensure its discoverability beyond the classroom and our university, while contributing to dialogues with other forms of multimedia scholarship that address the food history of the Middle East. While we do not expect to make further changes to the publication in content, we are considering ways of expanding its discoverability such as through indexing in databases for open access books. We also remain in conversation with library colleagues to discuss the project’s digital sustainability, in particular long term access and preservation of the project. Although rapid changes to the digital publishing and humanities landscape often lead to the creation of new digital tools and software, platforms can also be vulnerable to decreased vendor support over time. While Scalar continues, as of 2024, to enjoy support from the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, there may come a time when that is no longer the case. Understanding how to preserve long-term access to the content of the Scalar site, even when it may no longer be navigable in its current form, is a significant phase of post-publication production that we are considering as we reflect on the project, its outcomes, and its future impact as both a scholarly and pedagogical resource.
To repeat, the Scalar site that we published entailed sustained, collective teamwork; energy and perseverance; and careful thought. The results speak for themselves and have left us exhilarated and proud. Students contributed to a beautiful, sophisticated digital book which we hope will endure for years to come as a work of public scholarship.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank many colleagues who offered advice or help with this project, or helped to secure library resources, including cookbooks. From the Penn Libraries, thanks go to Arthur Kiron, Emily Esten, Amanda Licastro, John Pollack, Nick Okrent, and Lynne Farrington. From the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Innovation (CETLI), thanks go to Catherine Turner and Bruce Lenthall. From the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, thanks go to Stewart Varner and Jim English. The authors wish to acknowledge the Penn Libraries' Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship and the Benjamin Franklin Scholars Program. The authors are grateful to editors at the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy who provided feedback to improve this article: Asma Neblett and Maura Smale of CUNY Graduate Center, and Sarah Silverman of the University of Michigan, Dearborn and Goodwin University. They also wish to thank the four members of the Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel of Los Angeles who encouraged us and who generously shared insights about their cookbook and congregation—Elaine Lindheim, Mireille Mathalon, Rae Cohen, and Avi Levy. Finally, we thank our students at the University of Pennsylvania, whose intelligence, enthusiasm and hard work enabled this project to succeed.
