ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an urgent text message from Curtis Fletcher, the project manager for Scalar, an online publishing platform. Platforms like Scalar and Mukurtu enable experiments in mediated and multimodal communication while also engendering rich forms of collaboration. Scalar was conceived as a platform that could help university presses ease into digital publishing. The content of a Scalar project had triggered an automatic shutdown of the entire site because an initial warning went to an incorrect email address. Many of the projects seem less odd today after years of interacting with apps of many kinds and as video dominate the web. While many projects created with the platform are less aesthetically experimental than pieces created for Vectors, the platform also has an API that allows it to support a wide variety of design and aesthetic choices. The work on Vectors had been incredibly fulfilling, but the fellowship process was expensive and time consuming and would be impossible to fund forever.
