mdst3705 2013-02-26-db-as-genre
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The Genre of the Database
Prof. AlvaradoMDST 3705
26 February 2013
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Business
• We will have class on March 7th
–My conference has been cancelled– Our schedule will change some
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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
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Interactive view of the Charrette poem
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A "hypergraph" of the same data, showing relationships between characters and figures.
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A graph of words, classified by themes (Colby)
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TEXT(WORDS)
THEMEDICTIONARY
(Links words to themes)
Colby's data model
VIEW of THEME in TEXT
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These are all “views” of a database
Views are created from databases through queries and algorithms
They “emerge” from the database
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The Database as Symbolic Form
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What is a symbolic form?
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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
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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.
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http://www.ski.org/CWTyler_lab/CWTyler/Art%20Investigations/PerspectiveRules/Image2.gif
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Flagellation, Piero della Francesca, c. 1448-49
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Demonstration of internal light source in Flagellation by Piero della Francesca
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What kind of worldview is expressed by linear perspective?
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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
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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
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Another kind of symbolic form is “montage”
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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
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Picasso's Gernika
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Compare to photography, the quintessential realist form
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Which is more real?
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Symbolic forms are like Colby’s cultural models
TEXTS, IMAGES, etc.
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How can a database be a symbolic form?
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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?
?
?paradigm syntagm
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Digital media are different
Paradigm can be exposed as well
This is a big deal
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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
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In a game like Civilization IV, the “Civilopedia” governs play
The “board” is the interface to
the database
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In a game like Skyrim, the database underlies all decisions
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The game is an interface to the database
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Playing the game is interacting with the database
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The database is foregrounded and constant, whereas the narrative – the outcome of playing – is variable and ephemeral
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This is true of most games – this is how you create something in Minecraft
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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
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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
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Would Dante today spend his time creating a database of Classic Greece, Rome, and Christendom?
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Does narrative matter?
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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
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Tragedy and Comedy are different modes of
narrative resolution. Can there be tragedy
in databases?
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This is the problem faced by digital humanists in creating digital archives
of primary source materials
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Do archives do violence to the work they represent? Do they have advantages to traditional forms of remediation, such as the critical edition?
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Is there a good fit between Whitman’s work and the form of the database?
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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.”
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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?