The Little Database Volume 64
A Poetics of Media Formats
Published on 24. June 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
240 pages
978-1-5179-1882-8 (ISBN)
Description
A poetics for reading the everyday objects that populate a hard drive
Bespoke online archives like PennSound and Eclipse host an astounding array of "old media" artifacts, posing a handcrafted counterpoint to the immense databases aggregated by digital titans like Google and Facebook. In The Little Database, Daniel Scott Snelson argues for the significance of these comparatively "small" collections, exploring how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host and how they might help us better understand our own private collections in turn.
Examining curated collections such as Textz, UbuWeb, and the Electronic Poetry Center, Snelson explores media-specific works by poets and artists, including William Carlos Williams, Tracie Morris, bill bissett, Nam June Paik, and Vicki Bennett. He develops creative tools and contingent methods for reading cultural data, whether found on the internet or in our own collections of TXT, JPG, MP3, and MOV artifacts, presenting case studies to show how these objects have come to find revised meaning in their digital contexts. Along the way, experimental poetic interludes give readers practical entry points into the creative practice of producing new meanings in any given little database.
Inventive and interdisciplinary, The Little Database grapples with the digitized afterlives of cultural objects, showing how the past is continually reconfigured to shape the present. It invites readers to find playful and personal means for unpacking their own data collections, in the process discovering idiosyncratic ways to explore and connect with digital archives.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
Bespoke online archives like PennSound and Eclipse host an astounding array of "old media" artifacts, posing a handcrafted counterpoint to the immense databases aggregated by digital titans like Google and Facebook. In The Little Database, Daniel Scott Snelson argues for the significance of these comparatively "small" collections, exploring how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host and how they might help us better understand our own private collections in turn.
Examining curated collections such as Textz, UbuWeb, and the Electronic Poetry Center, Snelson explores media-specific works by poets and artists, including William Carlos Williams, Tracie Morris, bill bissett, Nam June Paik, and Vicki Bennett. He develops creative tools and contingent methods for reading cultural data, whether found on the internet or in our own collections of TXT, JPG, MP3, and MOV artifacts, presenting case studies to show how these objects have come to find revised meaning in their digital contexts. Along the way, experimental poetic interludes give readers practical entry points into the creative practice of producing new meanings in any given little database.
Inventive and interdisciplinary, The Little Database grapples with the digitized afterlives of cultural objects, showing how the past is continually reconfigured to shape the present. It invites readers to find playful and personal means for unpacking their own data collections, in the process discovering idiosyncratic ways to explore and connect with digital archives.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
Reviews / Votes
"The Little Database is an incredibly powerful intervention into twenty-first-century experimental poetics and avant-garde media practices. It's an absolute delight to read Daniel Scott Snelson's critical engagement with digital media as a literary and artistic form. His sociopoetical method provides an exciting approach that goes beyond both close reading and large-scale computational data analysis." - Stephanie Boluk, coauthor of Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames"With an extraordinary eye for detail, Daniel Scott Snelson opens up the space between big data and close reading, leveraging the signification of 'media' in its most capacious sense: materiality, file format, distribution network, platform, infrastructure, community. The results dazzle with eye-opening insight, astonish with breathtaking interpretive acrobatics, and invite with the infectious delight of discovering how many vast worlds lodge within the little." - Craig Dworkin, author of Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography
"The Little Database is an important publication. It opens new ground for close reading in an environment that heavily promotes big data techniques and the neoliberal ideologies that accompany it in the new economy of attention. It strongly contributes to a deepening of new media poetics and media materialism in a way that fruitfully complements media archeology." - Leonardo Reviews
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Minnesota
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
71 black and white illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 228 mm
Width: 150 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
354 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5179-1882-8 (9781517918828)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Daniel Scott Snelson is a writer, editor, archivist, and assistant professor in the departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, where he also serves as faculty with the Digital Humanities Program, the UCLA Game Lab, and the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies. He is author of multiple volumes of experimental poetry and poetics, including Elden Poem, Apocalypse Reliquary, and EXE TXT.
Content
Contents
Introduction. Reading the Little Database
1. Textwarez: The Executable Files of Textz.com
Interlude 1. EXE TXT
2. Distributing Services: Periodical Preservation and Eclipse
Interlude 2. L?A?N?G?U?A?G?E
3. Live Vinyl MP3: Echo Chambers among the Little Databases
Interlude 3. Also This: No Title
4. Dropping the Frame: From Film to Database
Interlude 4. Flash Artifacts
Epilogue. The EPC: On the Persistence of Obsolescent Networks
Acknowledgments.zip
Notes
Index
Introduction. Reading the Little Database
1. Textwarez: The Executable Files of Textz.com
Interlude 1. EXE TXT
2. Distributing Services: Periodical Preservation and Eclipse
Interlude 2. L?A?N?G?U?A?G?E
3. Live Vinyl MP3: Echo Chambers among the Little Databases
Interlude 3. Also This: No Title
4. Dropping the Frame: From Film to Database
Interlude 4. Flash Artifacts
Epilogue. The EPC: On the Persistence of Obsolescent Networks
Acknowledgments.zip
Notes
Index