database structure

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)

This paper takes a digital hermeneutic approach (Van Nuenen and Van de Ven) to database research in the field of electronic literature. I analyze the ELMCIP Knowledge Base (KB), a publicly available cross-referenced database of electronic literature that allows contributors to enter and edit information. I consider the peripheries of the database from the perspective of the development, population, and research use of information in the KB.

As developers, we consider it essential to have fields for information that will document e-lit practices and their authors that are as accurate as possible without adding superfluous or problematic information or making the records too complicated to fill out. This can lead to sensitive issues: I recount a current discussion of the use of the gender field in the author records of the KB, combining the community discussion in the ELMCIP/ELO Facebook groups with sources from library science and radical cataloging (i.e. Drabinkski 2014).

The development of the KB is inextricably linked with the electronic literature community, laying bare issues of having community that is inclusive but which nevertheless inevitably has people at its center and in the peripheries. The KB can be regarded as both a service to the community and as an obligation for the community, which is a principal consideration because of its crowdsourced system. I take the perspective of digital labor (i.e. Terranova 2013) to give insight into the processes involved in the maintenance of the KB, within broader academic and economic structures.

Finally, as a result of the development and crowdsourced population of the KB, there are many anomalies in the KB. Completion of documenting the entire field of electronic literature systematically is a tantalizing goal that we know we are never going to reach but nevertheless we feel like we almost have because of the sheer amount of information in the database. The KB has been used in several quantitative papers (i.e. Rettberg 2013) as well as numerous student projects. I reflect on the implications for the structure and practices of the KB for doing quantitative research, by paying special attention to ‘outliers’ in the datasets.

Through these three reflections, I argue for a digital hermeneutic approach to database research which oscillates between analyzing the textual and contextual levels of database practices, between individual and collective. Analyzing the peripheries of the database in this manner uncovers the mutual dependence between the database and its community in both critical and prolific ways.

(Abstract in programme)

In their article "A Survey of Electronic Literature Collections" Luis Pablo and Maria Goicoechea describe characteristics and functions of collections of electronic literature and analyze descriptors used and the way information can be accessed. Based on their observations, Pablo and Goicoechea advocate a database structure which is flexible and can produce a dynamic archiving model as texts are registered and collected so that tags form a close set for the texts in the collection and this set can expand as new texts make new tags necessary. Further, the organization of tags into ever more complex taxonomies seems inevitable, since this provides an accurate description of knowledge accumulation with respect to the field's richness. They postulate that the study of tagging practices applied to digital works provides us with guidelines not only to describe texts of electronic literature, but also to demonstrate the wide variety of forms which a literary text can embody.

(Abstract article)