The Genre of the Database

Prof. AlvaradoMDST 3705

26 February 2013

Business

• We will have class on March 7th

–My conference has been cancelled– Our schedule will change some

Review

• Last week we looked at how texts can be modeled by relational databases– The Princeton Charrette Project– Colby’s study of folktales (implicitly)

• The database allows us to reverse engineer the text into a set of tables– The text becomes a database–What is usually called the text becomes

just another view–Many other views are possible

Interactive view of the Charrette poem

A "hypergraph" of the same data, showing relationships between characters and figures.

A graph of words, classified by themes (Colby)

TEXT(WORDS)

THEMEDICTIONARY

(Links words to themes)

Colby's data model

VIEW of THEME in TEXT

These are all “views” of a database

Views are created from databases through queries and algorithms

They “emerge” from the database

The Database as Symbolic Form

What is a symbolic form?

A symbolic form is a cognitive frame that links the social, psychological, and technical practices of a culture.

Symbolic forms internalize and express worldview.

For example, the idea of perspective in the

Renaissance

Linear perspective

A mathematical system for creating the illusion of space and distance on a flat surface. The system originated in Florence, Italy in the early 1400s.

http://www.ski.org/CWTyler_lab/CWTyler/Art%20Investigations/PerspectiveRules/Image2.gif

Flagellation, Piero della Francesca, c. 1448-49

Demonstration of internal light source in Flagellation by Piero della Francesca

What kind of worldview is expressed by linear perspective?

Humanism, or Rational Individualism

Rational• Use of geometryIndividual• Paintings are

literally from an individual’s point of view

• But objective too

Vitruvian Man, da Vinci, circa 1487

The Battle of Wagram (July 5–6, 1809) was one of the most important military engagements of the Napoleonic Wars and ended in a decisive victory for Emperor Napoleon I's French and Allied army against the Austrian army under the command of Archduke Charles of Austria-Teschen. The battle virtually spelled the destruction of the Fifth Coalition, the Austrian and British-led alliance against France.

PERSPECTIVE CAPTURES THE INSTANT

Another kind of symbolic form is “montage”

Muslin painting of Battle of Little Big Horn done by Dakota artist, Kicking Bear, circa 1896. 1026.G.1. From the Irvin S. Cobb Collection (Southwest Museum of the American Indian, Autry National Center)

MONTAGE CAPTURES THE EVENT

Picasso's Gernika

Compare to photography, the quintessential realist form

Which is more real?

Symbolic forms are like Colby’s cultural models

TEXTS, IMAGES, etc.

How can a database be a symbolic form?

Database as Symbolic Form

• Order does not matter (“random access”)– Tables are meant to be sorted and filtered– Tables have no natural beginning or end

• All records functionally equal– There is no fixed hierarchy of entries in a

table

• Boundaries between objects are blurred– For example, a table of texts will mix

them up

Database as Symbolic Form

• These characteristics infuse all media forms that make use of databases

• This includes many things:–Web pages– Social media– CDROMs– Games– Archives and Thematic Research

Collections

• Effects include: mash-ups, retweets and reblogs, lists of links, etc.

Database as Symbolic Form

• At a deeper level, Manovich argues that databases produce a radical structural transformation in media– Databases expose the paradigmatic level

that is normally hidden– Make the syntagmatic level ephemeral,

where normal it is fixed and dominant

• To understand this, you need to know something about structuralism– Closely related to semiotics, the study of

signs

Structuralism can be used to describe the media forms studied and created by

scholars

Books and paintings, for example, are syntagmatic expressions of cultural

paradigms

However, these cultural forms present only syntagm, not paradigm

?

?

?paradigm syntagm

Digital media are different

Paradigm can be exposed as well

This is a big deal

In other words, when an artist creates a story, painting, or film, the

paradigmatic parts – notes, index cards, raw footage -- are usually lost

Thrown away or in the head

But with digital media, this stuff becomes part of the work itself

In a game like Civilization IV, the “Civilopedia” governs play

The “board” is the interface to

the database

In a game like Skyrim, the database underlies all decisions

The game is an interface to the database

Playing the game is interacting with the database

The database is foregrounded and constant, whereas the narrative – the outcome of playing – is variable and ephemeral

This is true of most games – this is how you create something in Minecraft

Manovich’s argument is that with digital media, paradigm is

both materialized and foregrounded, and this shapes

how we think

One effect is that digital media make narrative problematic

Table of Symbolic Forms

SYMBOLIC FORM

PARADIGM SYNTAGM WORLDVIEW

Linear Perspective

Backgrounded Fixed snapshot of a single event

Individual

Traditional Narrative

Backgrounded Fixed sequence of many events

Montage Projected onto syntagm

Collocation of many events

Social

Database Foregrounded Dynamic, ephemeral result of interaction

Would Dante today spend his time creating a database of Classic Greece, Rome, and Christendom?

Does narrative matter?

Narrative

• Narratives oppose database logic– Order matters– There is a “sense of an ending”

• The “database” is internal, unexposed– In the head of the author

• The result of an internal algorithm– The author’s in the act of writing

Tragedy and Comedy are different modes of

narrative resolution. Can there be tragedy

in databases?

This is the problem faced by digital humanists in creating digital archives

of primary source materials

Do archives do violence to the work they represent? Do they have advantages to traditional forms of remediation, such as the critical edition?

Is there a good fit between Whitman’s work and the form of the database?

According to Folsom, yes:“Not only is Whitman's work rhizomorphous, so also is a

database.”

And Price: “If the Walt Whitman Archive

resembles a database … so, too, does Whitman’s own process of

composition.”

Folsom also asserts:

“What we used to call the canon wars were actually the first stirrings of the attach of the

database on narrative.” (1574)

What do you make of this?