Eric Gordon, Associate Professor in the department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College, and Paul Mihailidis, Associate Professor in the department of Marketing Communication, also at Emerson, have just finished editing one of the most extensive Scalar projects to date: The Civic Media Project. Consisting of over 100 case studies, by as many contributors, the project is an online companion to a print edition, which includes 25 case studies in 18 chapters and is scheduled for publication by MIT Press in Spring 2016.

The Scalar companion is meant to expand upon the print edition not just by offering many additional case studies, but as well, by offering the reader a richer experience of the media under analysis and by enabling commentary and discussion among the book’s contributors and readers on the pages of those case studies. The Scalar companion also offers Gordon and Mihailidis the means to continuously update the project with new and relevant case studies. “Because civic media, by definition, combines theory and practice, we wanted there to be an easily accessible resource that could compliment the book volume,” Gordon writes, “I think there is real value in case studies, especially in an emerging field that is hungry for empirical examples – that is why there are short cases included in the print book. Our hope is that the Scalar project compliments the book with a resource of peer reviewed short cases, from scholars and practitioners from around the world. I think Scalar will build enthusiasm for the book by creating a place to share and analyze cases of civic media use in an ongoing and critical fashion.”

The Civic Media Project consists of case studies spanning four engaging topics: Play + Creativity, Systems + Design, Learning + Engagement, and Community + Action. But since, as the editors say, there is “considerable overlap” between individual cases within those four main topics, contributors have created a detailed and robust tag structure to the overall project which readers can explore using Scalar’s built-in tag visualization. Using the interactive visualization, readers can see, for instance, which case studies discuss citizen journalism or which cases discuss both open data and social justice.

All of these affordances are what the editors had in mind when beginning this project. The Civic Media Project is part of a recent trend among scholars using Scalar in partnership with academic presses to produce new kinds of peer-reviewed publications—in this case, an expansive online-only, media-rich, interactive companion. “I wanted to use Scalar because of how I understood the conceptual inroads the platform was making in online publishing,” Gordon told us, “What ultimately drew me to the platform, besides knowing and trusting the people behind it, was the promise of being part of a community of academic authors experimenting with online forms.”

See The Civic Media Project.