To get a feel for Bodies and Structures, we suggest that new readers explore the site in the following ways. Be sure to check out the screencasts, which provide click-by-click guides to navigation and using the site's main tools.
Read through one or two modules
- Watch a brief screencast that introduces you to how to navigate a module (1 minute).
- Select a module from the Modules page. You can return to this Guide at any time via the Menu Bar in the upper-left hand corner.
Explore using the Complete Grid Visualization
Use the Complete Grid Visualization to see how one or more of the pages you’ve just visited connect to other modules and pages within the site. Often, this will be via shared tag relationships. The pages are ordered alphabetically by title.
- K/D SCREENCAST (2): USING THE COMPLETE GRID VISUALIZATION] TARGET TIME: 2 MINUTES
Or, pick another page or pages on the grid and explore the connections they reveal. Select a page and follow the red lines to see its tag or tags. You can also start by clicking on a tag page (a red block) to identify the various pages to which that tag relates. You might find some surprisingly generative juxtapositions.
- K/D Screencast: Using the Complete Grid Visualization (Tags)
When clicking pages on the grid, use the Inspector to reveal details and metadata about each page.
You can click on as many pages as you want to explore different relationships or pathways through the site. (Remember, in Scalar, every object is a page.) Clicking “Visit” underneath the title will open the page in a new tab and preserve your selections on the grid.
Explore the Tag Map
Like the Complete Grid Visualization, the Tag Map allows you to see how spatial concepts take on different historical meanings in different historical contexts. In contrast to the Grid Visualization, the Tag Map allows you to start with a concept and work your way down to specific pages, rather than starting with a page and working your way up to its conceptual tags. The "tag (top) down" approach is particularly useful when you know the concept you are interested in, and want to read across places to see how it appears throughout Bodies and Structures modules.
- [K/D SCREENCAST (3): HOW TO USE THE TAG MAP] TARGET TIME: 2 MINUTES
Click to expand two or more tags to reveal the various pages they contain. Look at how the visualization shows connections or suggests combinations of tags to think with.
Explore the Geotagged Map
Many of the pages in Bodies and Structures contain geolocational metadata that can be rendered as pins on a Google map. Click on any pin to reveal the module it represents.
The Lenses tool allows you to produce more complex visualizations using the Google map widget. For a detailed guide, see below.
Use the Lenses tool to create your own visualizations
"Lenses" is a new tool for Bodies and Structures, which we developed in collaboration with Erik C. Loyer and Craig Dietrich at Scalar and with significant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Lenses will be made available to all Scalar users.
What are Lenses? The Lenses tool plays a special role in Bodies and Structures. Lenses brings our readers—you!—into our multivocal spatial history. Use Lenses to search and visualize the content of the book in new ways. Set search parameters to develop more complex and focused approaches to the site’s materials. Generate novel visualizations and analyses by combining the site’s materials.
You can access Lenses at any time by selecting "Manage Lenses" from the Compass menu in the upper-left hand corner.
To see an example of how to use Lenses, follow along with the screencast below:
- [K/D SCREENCAST (4): USING THE LENSES TOOL]. TARGET TIME: 5 MINUTES
The screencast shows you how to make the following Lenses:
- a list of all of the pages tagged by “Sourcebook.”
- a Word Cloud of all of the pages that have been tagged by “Invader” and the tag children (i.e., the pages that they tag).
- Convert the above Word Cloud into a List. What kinds of pages does it reveal? Using the inspector tool, explore the different metadata on these pages to see if you want to create other kinds of searches.
- Create a new Lens that shows how we have categorized pages that contain a particular text string. Create a grid that includes all of the pages that contain the text string “colonial” and their parents (filter by relationship: add any items that are all types that are parents).
- Use the Lens to retrace your steps. Create a Lens that shows a list of all of the pages that you have visited in the past three hours. List: All pages: visited in the last 3 hours.
If you think that other readers would benefit from seeing the site through your Lens, please select “Make Public” from the dropdown menu. This will submit your Lens to David and Kate for review.
- K/D Screencast: Submitting a Public Lens. Target time: 1 min.
Use the Context button to make visualizations on the fly
Each page features a "context" button in the upper-right hand corner. Click on this button to reveal the page's relationships. You can also visualize this page and its relationships, right from the Context button, by clicking “Visualize.”
For more suggestions about how to use Bodies and Structures for research or in the classroom, continue on this path. For more on our theoretical framework and findings, proceed to “Reorienting Our Scholarship.” Or if you want to jump right into the site, proceed to the Main Menu.
