The digitized afterlives of cultural objects.

What is the opposite of “big” data? In a society where households commonly store personal archives of photos, financial records, and other documents, the “little” database—the personal data collection that is stored and backed up and not accessed frequently—deserves a category of its own. In The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats, Daniel Scott Snelson examines globally accessible little databases, such as Textz, Eclipse, and UbuWeb, explores how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host, and asks how they might help us better understand our own private collections in turn. Snelson is joined in conversation with Vicki Bennett, Craig Dworkin, and Luca Messarra. 

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.

Vicki Bennett is a multidisciplinary British artist working under the name People Like Us. 

Craig Dworkin is professor of English at the University of Utah.

Luca Messarra is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University, and founder of Undocumented Press.

EPISODE REFERENCES:
Alan Liu

Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels, “deformance”

We Edit Life, film (People Like Us/Vicki Bennett; partnership with Lovebytes)

Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (Internet Archive, 2024, eds. Luca Messarra, Chris Freeland, Juliya Ziskina)

Eclipse, an image-based archive of small press poetry books and magazines

PennSound, a site distributing audio recordings of poetry readings

UbuWeb, a collection of experimental film and video art

Allen Institute for AI

C4/Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus

Christopher Kelty

LANGUAGE magazine

Christian Marclay’s The Clock

Johanna Drucker

Memory of the World archive

Not Equals language project

Future Knowledge podcast

Heated Words: Searching for a Mysterious Typeface / Rory McCartney and Charlie Morgan

In Praise of Copying / Marcus Boon

Praise for the book:
“The Little Database is an incredibly powerful intervention into twenty-first-century experimental poetics and avant-garde media practices.”
—Stephanie Boluk

“The Little Database 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.”
—Leonardo Reviews

“Snelson targets the fundamental assumption underlying much of contemporary DH work: that meaningful interpretation necessarily depends on the deployment of massive amounts of data.”
—Oxford's Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

“This book, while short in length, is certain to be long in influence, as it lays groundwork for future scholars, artists, readers, website makers, and archivists. The twists and turns, both in methodology and in specific analyses, are far more exciting than any summary, or even multiple readings of them, could serve.”
—Digital Humanities Quarterly

The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats by Daniel Scott Snelson is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available at Manifold.