database

Returning to his 2010 essay, “Electronic Literature as World Literature,” Tabbi extends those arguments in light of community built scholarly databases that have since emerged and in contrast to an uncritical tracking of “views, citations, downloads and occasional shared themes” (not to mention an increased precarity of authorship, where one’s scholarly work is basically given away).

For digital practices to be literary, Tabbi argues, our selections need to circulate within various institutional, academic, curatorial, and cultural structures – each of which is devising its own set of relations to the digital. This essay aims to initiate those ongoing conversations and evaluations in the field of born digital, electronic literature. In so doing, Tabbi suggests how acts of close reading can bring scholars into closer contact with one another and also activate the databases where e-lit archives are presently stored, read, curated, and mined for verbal and perspectival patterns. (Which have been described, in broad outline as a kind of distant reading.)

Engagement with public databases has become a leading way for scholars, artists, and readers alike to encounter works of electronic literature as well as get an overview of the field. Although acknowledged as an important and difficult process, database construction is, in practice, too often underestimated as merely a preparatory task in Digital Humanities. Through the conception of database criticism, I provide a critical apparatus to approach databases in terms of qualitative and aesthetic characteristics.

Considering public databases as media texts, I take a digital hermeneutic approach to the reading strategies involved in engaging with databases. What follows is the presence of databases as cultural artifacts that are themselves studied in humanities and social science frameworks. It is in the interest of both the quality and esteem of the databases to develop ways to study and evaluate them parallel to academic reviews of monographs and edited collections.

I offer a media-specific framework of four core vectors for database criticism: data and scope, experience, aesthetics, and labor. Building on Critical Data Studies, database criticism needs to identify the means and objectives of the database and thing along with those in reviewing the data. But a database is so much more than its data. A good database incites the pleasure of anticipation and this is determined by both the user and browsing experience. This is linked to the aesthetics of the database, which includes the accessibility of the database at its core. Finally, the explicit evaluation of labor addresses which value is placed on various tasks of developing and maintaining an academic database.

My call for database criticism opens up ways to revalue the databases as dissemination of research and provide the opportunity to highlight all elements that we wish to be part of the field going forward.

Over the past half century, computing has profoundly altered the ways stories are imagined and told. Immersive, narrative, and database technologies transform creative practices and hybrid spaces revealing and concealing the most fundamental acts of human invention: making stories.The Digital Imaginary illuminates these changes by bringing leading North American and European writers, artists and scholars, like Sharon Daniel, Stuart Moulthrop, Nick Montfort, Kate Pullinger and Geof Bowker, to engage in discussion about how new forms and structures change the creative process. Through interviews, commentaries and meta-commentaries, this book brings fresh insight into the creative process form differing, disciplinary perspectives, provoking questions for makers and readers about meaning, interpretation and utterance. The Digital Imaginary will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including storymakers, educators, curators, critics, readers and artists, alike.

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Table of contents

AcknowledgementsIntroductionThe Digital ImaginaryPart One: DatabaseInterviewsConnections And Coincidences In The End: Death In Seven Colors: A Conversation With David ClarkEmotional Proximity Through Inside The Distance: A Conversation With Sharon DanielCommentariesStuart Moulthrop: Now What: Sharon Daniel And David Clark On The Digital Imaginary. Judith Aston: The Readerly And The Cinematic: Hybrid Reconfigurations ThroughDigital Media Practice. Part Two: ArchiveInterviewsPry As A Cinematic Novel: A Conversation With Samantha GormanThe Generative Archive Of Encyclopedia: A Conversation With Håkan Jonson And Johannes Heldén.CommentariesLisa Swanstrom: The Taxonomy Is Imprecise.Geoffrey C. Bowker: Reading The Endless ArchivePart Three: MultimodalityInterviewsAuthorship In Inanimate Alice and Letter To An Unknown Soldier: A Conversation With Kate PullingerThe Metamorphoses Of Front As A Narrative Told Through Social Media Interface: A Conversation With Donna Leishman.CommentariesAnastasia Salter: Collaborative Voices: Kate Pullinger's Digital Authorial Voice. Mark C. Marino: What Holds Electronic Literature Together? MetacommentariesIllya Szilak: Do Cyborgs Dream Of Iphone Apps? The Body And Storytelling In The Digital Imaginary. Nick Montfort: Computational Literary Practices And Processes And Imagination.AfterwordSteve Tomasula: Haunting The Digital Imaginary. BibliographyIndex

(Source: Publisher's catalog copy)

In this 5-minute lightning talk, I introduced my work-in-progress chapter on database criticism. A video of the presentation is available on YouTube, see below.

In this paper, I investigate the database characteristics of electronic literature that makes them into social forms. Database structures are both fragmented and relational, displaying hypertext characteristics. I approach The Atlas Group Archive and haikU, two works of electronic literature, as examples of material and conceptual databases in order to explore the database function so saturated in our daily life. Both works highlight a database aesthetics, although the ways they do so are polar opposites. I analyze the works within the framework of digital hermeneutics, continuously considering the relationship between text and context, between parts and whole. I demonstrate how AGA is an explicit database, supposedly showing a 'complete' archive, whereas haikU is an implicit database that hides the corpus of sentences. I show the sociality of the databases, thematizing both the human process behind database formation as a whole, as well as how the individual elements influence the perception of the overall database. Finally, I take my findings to a broader perspective and consider what AGA and haikU can teach us about the materiality, conceptuality, and sociality of the omnipresent structure of the database.(Source: abstract in ACM Digital Library)

I investigate the database characteristics of electronic literature that makes them into social forms. Database structures are both fragmented and relational, displaying hypertext characteristics. I approach The Atlas Group Archive and haikU, two works of electronic literature, as examples of material and conceptual databases in order to explore the database function so saturated in our daily life. Both works highlight a database aesthetics, although the ways they do so are polar opposites. I analyze the works within the framework of digital hermeneutics, continuously considering the relationship between text and context, between parts and whole. I demonstrate how AGA is an explicit database, supposedly showing a 'complete' archive, whereas haikU is an implicit database that hides the corpus of sentences. I show the sociality of the databases, thematizing both the human process behind database formation as a whole, as well as how the individual elements influence the perception of the overall database. Finally, I take my findings to a broader perspective and consider what AGA and haikU can teach us about the materiality, conceptuality, and sociality of the omnipresent structure of the database.

(Source: abstract)

At meetings in Siegen (2009), Sydney (2010), Provincetown ( 2010), Bleckinge (2010), Bergen (2011), and Morgantown (2011), the editors of the Electronic Literature Directory have established and developed a Consortium on Electronic Literature (CELL). The related database projects originating in each of these locations, is committed to the development of bibliographic standards, interoperability, and data-sharing to ensure the broad reach and wide range of literature and criticism that new media literary scholars are obligated to document and cultivate. In Paris this year, present members will meet to discuss the achievement of interoperability across our various platforms. First on our agenda, will be a report on progress toward the establishment of a "naming authority" for authors and works in the field of electronic literature, and we will continue towards our goal of institutionalizing basic bibliographic practices consistent with the emerging norms of the field.

This paper is not a reappraisal of Califia, as it needs no reappraisal in terms of its value to electronic literature, but a re-reading of what could be termed its hidden critical apparatus. While not wrongly referred to as “hypertext narrative,” this general category obscures a number of crucial structural and theoretical distinctions that suggest Califia rests on, and can offer, a different and powerful critical idiom of its own that has only recently found more theoretical expression as technology has advanced. Roughly contemporary (Luesebrink began Califia in 1995, when Patchwork Girl was published, and published it in 2000) and both on Eastgate, Califia remains in a relatively peripheral position in comparison, and not because Patchwork Girl appeared first. As many articles written about Patchwork will attest, PWG is and was more immediately accessible to the academic community via its attachment to several theoretical narratives around intertextuality, strategies of resistance, and a straightforward use of hypertext as structure and theme (“patching” and linking, e.g. Hayles 2005) that enabled both the extension of those critical narratives and analysis through them. Patchwork often is used to mark a moment in the critical history of electronic literature whereas Califia is not. For example, in Grigar’s and Moulthrop’s Pathfinders (2015), it is Patchwork Girl and not Califia included in the volume. Califia is simply not about those things, except where it offers a range of strategies of resistance, overtly to the loss of memory, and as such, to the subsumation of the feminine self that it resists not by patching/linking, but through the spatial assertion of a topology of artifacts, i.e. of the locative and attributive – and their manifestation is a map. While hypertext qua linking became, if not the dominant mode of creating and understanding electronic literature, what Luesebrink imagined for Califia while working in, essentially, HyperCard (Toolbook) is, as she notes, “a sort of narrative database” (http://califia.us/califiareimagined/califiare1.html). Resistance and a quest for truth/treasure is connected to both mapping the land and “reading” the map, i.e. a spatial understanding of history and time that until the more widespread use of GIS and other mapping systems as modes of description (Gregory 2014), has remained under-read in Califia. As Koskimaa noted nineteen years ago, “Spatiality has been one of the central topics in discussions about hypertexts, but spatial presentation has been in a very limited use in actual hypertext novels. Works like Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995), and Deena Larsen’s Samplers. Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts (1997) do use the spatial map as a site of signification, but in a very schematic way. The possibilities hinted at in Patchwork Girl … are used in a highly original way in Califia” (http://users.jyu.fi/~koskimaa/thesis/chapter7.htm 2000). When one links an “archival system” (Guertin on Califia, 2015) to a topological system of its expression and exploration in three dimensions, Califia’s fruitful difference in theoretical and imaginative approach stand out: examining Califia as both a database and environmental narrative reveals a critical apparatus underdeveloped in the literature so far. Mining Linguistic Content from Vast Audio and Video Archives for

Although many works of electronic literature use databases in some form, “not all new media objects are explicitly databases” (Manovich 41, my emphasis). I analyze two works of electronic literature, The Atlas Group Archive (Raad) and haikU (Wylde), as examples of different material and conceptual databases. I approach and compare the works within the framework of Digital Hermeneutics, continuously considering the relationship between text and context, between parts and whole.

Walid Raad's 1989-2004 The Atlas Group Archive (AGA) is a multimedial, fictional 'archive' which encompasses supposedly donated testimonies on the war in Lebanon (1974-1991), including diary logs, photographs with notes, and videos. The narrative is structured as a database, in which the layering of content in individual texts and images as well as in the database as a whole becomes the key feature.

Nanette Wylde's 2002 haikU is a haiku generator, which uses sentences submitted by readers on the website. These sentences all end up in the same pool of sentences that the generator draws from when creating a poem. When arriving on the website, the reader can read poems; a new one is generated each time the reader refreshes the page.

Both works highlight a database aesthetics, although the methods in which they do so are polar opposites. I demonstrate how AGA is an explicit database supposedly showing a ‘complete’ archive, whereas haikU is an implicit one that hides the collection of sentences. Moreover, I show the sociality of the databases, thematizing the human process behind database formation: AGA created a fake collective, the Atlas Group, and the illusion of donated testimonies and haikU includes its readers in creating texts that will supposedly become part of the work. Database structures are both fragmented and relational. I combine my database aesthetics reading with a close reading of individual texts in the works, considering how the interpretation is determined by the structure as a whole as well as how the individual elements influence how to regard the overall database.

Finally, I take my findings to a broader perspective and consider what AGA and haikU can teach us about the materiality, conceptuality, and sociality of the omnipresent structure of the database.

(Source: Abstract in Programme)