Week 10 Reading: Manovich

“Database as Symbolic Form” by Manovich.

New media objects do not nescessariry tell stories, they are instead correlated as databases and don’t have a traditional beginning or end. They are void of any form of element organisation or structure. Instead, they are collections of individual items.

Database: a structured collection of data. Data is stored and organised for fast searching and retrieval by a computer.

Databases can be hierarchical, a network, relational, and object-orientated; using different models to organise data.

 Web page: a sequential list of separate elements: text blocks, images, and links to other pages.

Online, pages are ever-growing and evolving. New elements and links can be edited and added at any time, making the Web an anti narrative made up of collections, not a story. As Manovich asks, “how can one keep a coherent narrative or any other development trajectory through the material if it keeps changing?”

Algorithms and data structures have a symbolic relationship. The more complex the data structure of a computer program, the simpler the algorithm needs to be, and vise versa. According to a computer, data structures and algorithms are two halves of the ontology of the world. In contrast, narrative forms do not require algorithm-like behaviour from their readers.