The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats
(Paperback)
Available Formats
Publishing Details
The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats
By (Author) Daniel Scott Snelson
University of Minnesota Press
University of Minnesota Press
1st October 2025
United States
Classifications
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
IT, Internet and electronic resources in libraries
Media studies
Physical Properties
Paperback
240
Width 152mm, Height 229mm, Spine 7mm
312g
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.
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Author Bio
Daniel Scott Snelson is a writer, editor, and archivist working as 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 Studies. He is author of multiple volumes of experimental poetry and poetics, including Elden Poem, Apocalypse Reliquary, and EXE TXT.
