Databased

Lev Manovich’s ‘Database As Symbolic Form’ focuses on the idea of database in the age of new media and digital computers, and how this interacts and contrasts with more traditional forms of narrative.

Manovich defines database as a structured collection of data, and says that it “is anything but a simple collection of objects”. These databases are unstructured with no narrative, they represent the world as a list that refuses to be ordered. Databases have “become the centre of the creative process in the computer age”. Websites are inherently databases; they are endless and unstructured collections of images, texts, and other data records.

Manovich claims that new media objects don’t tell stories like we’re used to in the media; they don’t have a beginning or an end, but are just collections of individual items, each no more significant than the next. Many major hubs of the internet, as identified in the power laws structure of the network, are clearly databases, such as Wikipedia, which is a database of information posted by anyone and everyone and basically any topic you could think of, and Google, a database of pretty much any website you can think of.

Again, I found that using the analogy of cinema editing helped my to slightly understand this reading, with Manovich using these ideas to compare database with its natural enemy: narrative. Database and narrative are binary opposites, where database is unordered, unstructured, and unlinear, narrative is ordered, structured, and liner, telling a clear story to the reader.

A film is a sequential narrative (even non-linear ones like Tarantino), they are a timeline of individual shots that appear on the cinema screen one at a time. You can see the shots that are accumulated throughout the process of actually filming a script as creating a database: the shots are individual, arbitrarily, and not yet in order, as much of filming is logistically done out of order. It is only when the editor begins to piece these shots together to match the script that the film transforms from a database to a narrative. As the author says, the editor creates “a unique trajectory through the conceptual space of all possible films that could have been constructed”.

I found this analogy useful again in comprehending the pretty intense and heavy ideas that are encompassed in this reading, and I think we can view hypertext and these online databases as like a film where the viewer can actively choose how it is edited – what shot comes next, what song is used, which character is the protagonist) – while it is being shown.

I found this reading pretty heavy going, but I eventually got some interesting points out of it. I like the idea of describing of a website as a database, and how this is inherently in contrast with narrative as the two concepts are direct opposites. Databases exemplify the concept of hypertext that we’ve been focusing on; they are interactive and constantly changing, while narrative is orderly structured and static over time.