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    The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats

    The Little Database by Snelson, Daniel Scott;

    A Poetics of Media Formats

    Series: Electronic Mediations;

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    47 067 Ft

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    Product details:

    • Publisher Univ Of Minnesota Press
    • Date of Publication 24 June 2025
    • Number of Volumes Hardback

    • ISBN 9781517918811
    • Binding Hardback
    • No. of pages240 pages
    • Size 229x152x7 mm
    • Weight 425 g
    • Language English
    • Illustrations 71 black and white illustrations
    • 700

    Categories

    Long 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.



    "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

     

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    Table of Contents:

    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

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