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[Scientific Articles]
Ackermans H., van de Ven I.
Electronic Literature in the Database and
the Database in Electronic Literature
© Communications. Media. Design, Vol. 4, №4, 2019 5
Electronic Literature in the Database and the
Database in Electronic Literature
Abstract:
Due to the constant threat of technological obsolescence, documentation practices
of archiving and database construction are of vital importance, to warrant that artists
and scholars can continue developing and understanding this field of practice and
study. To this end, multiple e-lit databases are being developed in the context of
research projects.
Within the field of Digital Humanities, database construction is too often regarded
merely as a preparatory task. But from the perspective of its developers, the e-lit DB
is both a research space, a form of dissemination, and a cultural artefact in itw own
right. By no means neutral containers, database carry out diverse processes
including storage, distribution, and exposition. Scholarship and artistic practice
entangle: scholars attempt to document and research a field. Artists interrogate the
database structure in their works, and the production of DBS further develops the
field, which leads to more (varied) creation and dissemination of electronic literature.
This article examines how the database form increasingly in-forms and infiltrates
electronic literature and becomes an aesthetic in its own right. We compiled a
research collection in the ELMCIP (Electronic Literature as a Model for Creativity in
Practice) Knowledge Base, consisting of works that reflect on the fact that they are
part of a database, by taking on its formal characteristics. We consider how
scholarship and artistic practice entangle: scholars attempt to document and
research a field, and artists interrogate the database structure in works and the
production of databases develops the field, which leads to more (varied) production
of electronic literature.
We analyze three works of electronic literature: Identity Swap Database by Olia
Lialina and Heath Bunting (1999), Dictionary of the Revolution by Amira Hanafi (2017),
and Her Story (2016) by Sam Barlow. Embedded in the database, these works reflect
a variety of roles for databases in digital culture. Our analyses will shed light on the
multifarious roles that databases play in the field of electronic literature—as storage
Ackermans H.
PhD student (аспирант) at the University of Bergen
(Bergen, Norway)
Hannah.Ackermans@uib.no
van de Ven I.
PhD, Assistant Professor at the Tilburg University
(Tilburg, Netherlands)
I.G.M.vdVen@uvt.nl
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Electronic Literature in the Database and
the Database in Electronic Literature
6 !© Communications. Media. Design, Vol. 4, №4, 2019
of information, platforms for dissemination, artistic artefacts, and as a methodological
tools for critical thinking about the construction of the field itself. In particular, we
focus on three functions of databases that are amplified by electronic literature:
reflection on online appropriation of identity and data use; commemoration or
preservation; and an exercise in empathy.
Keywords: electronic literature, database, media theory, narrative, digital
humanities.
The database, both as a reality and as a concept, is especially significant in the
digital information age. Many of today’s information structures include database
elements. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to assume that each of us deals with some
form of database on a daily basis. Databases each have their own materiality that
allows them to function as comprehensible forms of information.
In recent decades, the database form itself has been scrutinized in both media
arts and electronic literature. Here, we use the term ‘electronic literature’ to denote
forms and genres of writing that explore the specific capabilities of the computer and
network, as per Scott Rettberg’s definition (2019). Electronic literature is procedural
and computational. It is processed across multiple platforms, protocols, and
technologies in real time. This means that it is also an ephemeral genre. Due to the
constant threat of technological obsolescence, documentation practices of archiving
and database construction are of vital importance, to ensure that artists and scholars
can continue developing and understanding this field of practice and study. To this
end, multiple e-lit databases are being developed in the context of research projects.
In digital humanities, database construction is too often regarded merely as a
preparatory task. But from the perspective of its developers, the electronic literature
database is both a research space and a form of dissemination. Databases are by no
means neutral containers. They carry out many processes, including storage,
distribution, and exposition. Moreover, scholars increasingly analyze the database
itself as a cultural artifact. Rettberg, for example, gave a keynote lecture at the
International and Transdisciplinary Conference 2012 on the ELMCIP Knowledge Base
as an expression of collective and cultural memory.
In this paper, we begin to explore how the database form increasingly informs and
infiltrates electronic literature and becomes an aesthetic in its own right. In the
database, scholarship and artistic practice entangle. Scholars use these information
structures to document and research a field (in this case the field of electronic
literature). Artists, or creators of electronic literature, in turn interrogate the database
structure in their works. The production of databases then further develops the field,
which leads to more (varied) creation and dissemination of electronic literature.
We are compiling a research collection in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base. ELMCIP
stands for Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice, and
the objective of the Knowledge Base is to give a comprehensive overview of
electronic literature by documenting the field in a contributory and cross-referenced
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Ackermans H., van de Ven I.
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the Database in Electronic Literature
© Communications. Media. Design, Vol. 4, №4, 2019 7
manner. In the ELMCIP KB, we curate a collection of works that, we could say, self-
consciously reflect on the fact that they are part of a developing database society by
taking on its formal characteristics. For this paper, we have selected three of these
works to analyze: Identity Swap Database (1999) by Olia Lialina and Heath Bunting,
Amira Hanafi’s A Dictionary of the Revolution (2011), and Her Story (2015) by Sam
Barlow. On the one hand, these works have in common the aforementioned
reflectiveness on the database itself. But there are important differences, as we want
to show the range and variety of functions the database has in electronic literature.
Each case study therefore foregrounds another aspect or role of the database: Identity
Swap Database aims to critique identity politics and surveillance. A Dictionary of the
Revolution, we will argue, exemplifies the commemorative function of the database.
And last, Her Story is a database that collects stories in the form of videos that ask for
empathic identification from the viewer. Embedded in the database, we argue, these
works of electronic literature reflect a variety of roles for databases in digital culture.
Lev Manovich famously stated in The Language of New Media (2000) that the
database replaces narrative as our primary means of meaning-making in the computer
age. To explain how this works, he discusses the difference between paradigm and
syntagm as the two structural dimensions of all sign systems. The syntagm is, simply
put, a combination of signs. In language, for instance, a speaker produces an
utterance by threading together one element after another in a linear sequence. The
paradigmatic dimension is the set of all elements of a certain type from which the
speaker can choose. In language, all nouns form such a set, and all synonyms of a
particular word form another set. The elements in the syntagmatic dimension are
related in praesentia, while elements in the paradigmatic dimension are related in
absentia. This is how a narrative sequence is structured: the paradigm, which is the
database of selections out of which a narrative is built, remains implicit, whereas the
narrative resulting from it is explicit (Manovich 231). New media, however, has
reversed this relationship. Here, the paradigm is materially present: interactive
interfaces, for instance, present the user with a complete, explicit menu of all available
choices. The syntagm, the ‘narrative’ or string of subsequent choices actually made, is
dematerialized and therefore loses its privilege. This results in a move from temporal
to spatial presentations in media. Narrative, bound as it is to the linear order of
language through syntax, is a temporal technology. By contrast, data sets and
databases lend themselves to spatial displays. It has to be noted that Manovich’s
binary logic and the simplified conception of ‘narrative’ that underlies it have been
subjected to critique, for instance in the special issue of PMLA published in 2007, on
the “Genre of the Database.” See f.i. Jerome McGann’s essay “Database, Interface,
and Archival Fever” and Katherine Hayles’ “Narrative and Database: Natural
Symbionts” in that issue.
Another, related, difference is that between the finite and the potentially infinite.
Narrative amounts to a cause-and-effect trajectory with a beginning, middle, and end-
structure. The organizing principle of narrative is the plot, a structure of relationships
by which the events narrated are given meaning. Closure is of vital importance, since
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the Database in Electronic Literature
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the ending of the story drives the narrative. The end serves as a point from which the
meaning of beginning and middle can be determined (Brooks 1984). For the database,
by contrast, closure in any real sense is impossible. It represents the world as a list of
items without beginning or end, and every item possesses the same significance as
any other (Manovich 218). It is always possible to add a new element to the list. In
Archive Fever (Mal d’archive, 1995), Derrida emphasizes how the archive is radically
open-ended (68). The digital database is therefore potentially (depending on its space
for memory storage) infinite—the epitome of the archive.
This potential for unlimited combination and recombination of particulars, finally, is
what has led media theorists to pit narrative and database against each other in a
story of competition. Thus, Manovich provocatively states that “database and narrative
are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims
an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world.” (2001, 225). Ed Folsom follows
this suggestion, insisting that databases threaten to “displace narrative, to infect and
deconstruct narrative endlessly, to make it retreat behind the database or dissolve
back into it, to become finally its own sprawling genre” (2007, 1577). This would imply
that narratives, along with their selective and partial representations of the world, are
rendered obsolete by the engulfing scope of the database. But, in practice, the
relation between the two modes of organization is instead characterized by mutual
inspiration (Hayles 2007; Vesna 2007; Veel 2011; Pressman 2014). As Manovich
himself readily admits, database and narratives “produce endless hybrids” (2001, 234).
In our case studies, we will see that narrativity plays an important role.
The increasing cultural importance of the database in the current media culture,
together with the digitization of more and more information, influences existing modes
of representation in analog and digital art forms. In Victoria Vesna’s words, “[i]n an age
in which we are increasingly aware of ourselves as databases, identified by social
security numbers and genetic structures, it is imperative that artists actively participate
in how data is shaped, organised, and disseminated” (2000, 155). This realization has
led her and other scholars like Kristin Veel to consider the new hybrid forms of film,
literature, and art that they see emerging under the umbrella term of ‘database
aesthetics’. In Veel’s characterization,
[w]hat is termed database aesthetics … inscribes itself in a long cultural tradition of
fragmentation, excess and the challenge to linearity, but its prevalence in
contemporary culture – from popular films such as Memento (2000) to experimental
online artworks such as David Clark’s A is for Apple (2002) – justify its identification as
a distinct phenomenon. (2011, 310)
The works of art that Veel mentions share a mode of inventory that “prioritizes
simultaneity over selection and probes the boundaries of contemporary conditions of
attention” (312). In the words of Christiane Paul, “Database aesthetics itself has
become an important cultural narrative of our time, constituting a shift towards a
relational, networked approach to gathering and creating knowledge about cultural
specifics” (2007, 155). There is a growing body of research on these forms influenced
by the database: Victoria Vesna (2007) focuses on new media art, Ernst van Alphen
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© Communications. Media. Design, Vol. 4, №4, 2019 9
(2014) on the archival in the visual arts, and Veel (2009) on information structures in
the novel. The database embodies the “allatonceness” presaged by Marshall
McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962, 72). With this term, he indicated that the
most important effect of electronic media was to dissolve the traditional barriers
separating knowledge into distinct compartments, most importantly, the eradication of
our traditional concepts of time and space. This allatonceness, he claimed, enables us
to make connections across the whole range of human knowledge and experience.
We will now see to what different uses these aspects of database structures can be
put in electronic literature.
Identity Swap Database: Commodifying the Self Online
Identity Swap Database was created by net artists Olia Lialina and Heath Bunting
in 1999. It pretends to allow its users to, temporarily or permanently, switch identities.
If you want to “donate” your identity, you fill out a form with your basic data, mostly
physical characteristics (size, weight, color of eyes and hair, scars), but also your credit
history and criminal record. You enter an anonymous email address and upload a
photograph. These are then supposedly mixed and matched with people sharing
similar characteristics to create new identities. The other side of the database is the
option to look for a specific type of person with whom you wish to switch identities.
After filling out the desired characteristics, the database shows you pictures, each with
a percentage of how close the record is to your preferences.
Identity Swap Database plays with the interchangeable commodity status of
personal information on the Web, showing how humans are increasingly perceived as
data, and that the seemingly innocent game of exchange or "identity tourism" on the
Internet is hazardous. The work raises issues not only of identity, but also of security
and control, yet it does so by highlighting the voluntary donation of data; there is no
push or requirement to give the database your data other than getting the full
experience of the work itself. The work, moreover, reflects on the discrepancy
between self and other through the use of language. The forms that the user gets to
fill in are multilingual, shifting between different languages. This means that the user
sometimes needs to wait for the appearance of text in a language they understand to
be able to give the database their personal information. The field for mother tongue,
for example, shifts between “Muttersprache”, “родной язык”, “Lengua materna”, and
“Mother Tongue”, only to then give you just five options that do not fully correspond
to languages of instruction: English, Flemish, French, Japanese, and Russian. This
multilingual aspect highlights not only the multilingualism of online information, but
also more generally the tension between seemingly transparent and natural ways to
give information as opposed to the constructedness and otherness of the forms and
platforms that make this possible.
These issues are faced by research groups that focus on the curation of
databases. Collections and database structures are places of organization and
categorization par excellence. It is essential to have fields for information that will
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document practices that are as accurate as possible without adding superfluous or
problematic information. Building databases does not simply entail gathering data: it is
an active process containing numerous decisions that construct the data in a certain
way. The Identity Swap Database itself, for example, has been included in several
electronic literature databases, including NT2 Répertoire and ELMCIP KB. ELMCIP KB
combines metadata such as platforms, in this case HTML and Javascript, and
publication type (“Published on the Web (individual site)”) with a folksonomic tagging
structure, which for Identity Swap Database includes the tags “identity”, “faces”,
“database aesthetics”, “contributory database”, “database structure”, “online
database”. NT2, on the other hand, has a taxonomic tagging structure, which includes
the “nature” of the work (in this case simply “artwork”), and the mode of “interactivity”,
which for Identity Swap Database is determined as “sending a text”. This example
shows us how the same work is presented in different ways, influenced both by the
formal systems with which the databases wish to describe the work, as well as by the
individual judgements of the people filling in the information about the work. This is
not an evaluative question of what system performs optimally; rather, it is an assertion
that there are different manners of organizing and structuring data. As Vesna states:
“Data are the raw forms that are shaped and used to build architectures of knowledge
exchange and serve also as an active commentary on the environment they depend
on – the vast, intricate network with its many faces” (2007, xiii).
The Identity Swap Database foreshadowed such issues at an early stage. It
constitutes a powerful gesture of disconnectivity, defined by Pepita Hesselberth as
“the tendency toward voluntary psychic, socio-economic, and/or political withdrawal
from mediated forms of connectivity” (2017, 1992). The idea of disconnecting is
currently gaining traction as a “form of media resistance under the conditions of
neoliberal reform” (2017, 2001). Lialina’s and Bunting’s work imagines a provocative
escape from the storage, quantification, cross-referencing, and dissemination of
personal data beyond our express consent. It creates new owners for our confidential
data without a traceable relation with the architect. In sum, this first case takes on the
form of the database with its goal to critique identity politics and surveillance.
A Dictionary of the Revolution as a Memory Archive
Our second case has a different goal, which we might sum up as commemoration.
American-Egyptian writer and artist Amira Hanafi says of her project A Dictionary of
the Revolution that it “makes space for viewpoints that are no longer represented in
the media or in the Egyptian public” (Kickstarter 2015). Thus, Hanafi appropriates the
form of the dictionary, traditionally a source that is officially regulated, in order to
present a counter-narrative to the mainstream medium. She conceived of this project
in the wake of the uprising of 2011, from a desire to capture the voices of Egyptians in
these two years when public political speech and debate was suddenly commonplace
in the public spaces of Egypt, a precarious moment that parallels the ephemerality of
electronic literature as a whole. This unusual upsurge of public political speech was
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not to last: freedom of expression is again being threatened in Egypt by successive
regimes, as evidenced by the arrests of journalists since then. The “dictionary” seeks
to capture this moment for posterity. The project was awarded the 2018 New Media
Writing prize and the 2019 Turn On Literature prize.
Hanafi came up with the idea to construct vocabulary cards for 160 words often
heard in colloquial Egyptian after the uprising. This period of political upheaval, she
claims, was marked by a transformation in the linguistic sphere. New terms and
phrases were introduced to keep up with a rapidly changing political climate, words
like Balatagiya (which means thugs), Tamarod (rebel), and Al Dawla Al Amiqa (meaning
deep state). She put these on cards and used them to provoke discussion in face-to-
face interviews throughout six governorates of Egypt in 2014. Around 200 participants
described what the words meant to them, where they were heard and in what context,
as well as how their meanings might have changed since the revolution. Hanafi then
weaves imagined 'national dialogues' around each of the terms in the lexicon. She
further integrated transcriptions of these conversations into an archive that is now
online.
On the opening page, you find a comprehensive diagram of relationships between
the terms, which acts as an index to the website. There are so many lines of
connection that you can hardly make sense of the work as a whole. When you hover
the mouse cursor over a word, however, this reveals only the connections of that word
to other words in the diagram. Some words have more connections than others, and
when as a reader you enter the work, this is one of the first things you can interact
with and interpret. This interpretation process is guided by previous interactions with
data, whether that is social media, Wikipedia, or Digital Humanities projects. As such,
readers are already trained to value linking and to create narratives based on the
connections between wordsin the Dictionary.
Readers can, then, click on a word of their choice and read a collage of citations in
which interviewees used that particular word. Rather than a single clarification, each
text combines multiple interpretations of terms by different people. The term “sheep”,
the reader learns for example, is used as an insult for people following others. The
term was used before the revolution and afterwards it became used for followers of
the Army, the Brotherhood, but interviewees also refer to themselves, “because we're
all, like, really in a state of following”. The text also reflects on which people come up
with terms: “For sure, [sheep] was another term that came from the media, or from
those who benefit—whether felool or whatever. The ones in whose interest it would
be to have the Brotherhood called by that name.” This single mention of felool links
“sheep” to “felool”, a more central term discussed in the dictionary. The reader can
jump to other words connected to the page they are on, which are visually
represented by lines connecting the words, with a broader line indicating a stronger
connection. How central we consider each term shifts with each click and read. We
can keep reading and scrolling and look at the keywords without feeling as if we have
completed the work. The non-fiction work presents information, something we expect
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from databases, in a manner that is connected to their content. The network of the
text, the vastness of it, the wanting to learn and wanting to move forward, are all
reflections of the Egyptian uprisings themselves. The work was written in Arabic and
then translated to English, making it a memorial and instance of collective memory, as
well as a window into the world for people outside of Egypt. Open to the public, the
Dictionary archive can be used for research or can simply exist for posterity. So much
like databases of electronic literature which protect this ephemeral genre from
disappearing, this work functions as a memorial and ensures preservation of a
precarious mode of speech.
Her Story: Empathic Perspective-Taking
Whereas the first two case studies have, both in their own specific way, a political
message, the third and last case is different in this respect. Her Story by Sam Barlow
from 2015 is an interactive movie game for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. Though
oral and visual rather than textual, this police procedural game with live action footage
is included in several electronic literature databases. As a player, you sit down at an
antiquated computer desktop, featuring a 3.1-style Minesweeper-like game. A ReadMe
file explains the computer’s mechanics. There is a so called "L.O.G.I.C. Database" with
271 video clips. The aesthetics, with its layering of different windows and applications,
can be described as “hypermediacy” (Bolter & Grusin). Hypermediacy is a visual style
of presentation which combines multiple representations within a heterogeneous
space, and which makes the viewer very much aware of the fact that it is a medium
they are seeing. Its underlying logic requires the user to recognize the medium as
medium, and to desire that mediated experience. Indeed, playing Her Story, we are
made highly aware of the interface. This is reinforced by the old-fashioned style and
quality of the video footage and the interface: the story is set in 1994, and therefore
the aesthetics are fittingly retro, which adds to the realism.
You browse this database of clips from fictional police interviews to solve the case
of a missing man whose murdered body is later discovered. The interviews are all with
his girlfriend Hannah Smith, played by the British musician Viva Seifert. The game has
no explicit mechanical objectives. In the search bar, there’s only one word loaded up:
“murder”. Hannah’s answers have been transcribed, and you find fragments by
entering words in the search bar. Sorting can be done by inventing user tags, which
are then available as searchable items. A player can use the search bar in different
ways. The police context and “murder” prompt indicates the direction the narrative will
take. At the same time, the player can choose to search for seemingly random words
and get a feel of the characters first before inevitably being pulled into the plot. In any
case, searching for specific words does not mean the player will find what they expect
to find. In figuring out the underlying plot of Her Story, the player has to pay attention
to both verbal and visual clues to get to know the character better. Additionally, the
player needs to figure out who they are as they play. As a case long gone cold, videos
are years old, and it is unclear who you are and why you are searching. Every now and
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then, there are also moments of great intensity in the clips: lights flicker, providing a
glimpse of “your” face looking into the old CRT monitor.
True to its database form, the procedural game lacks closure. It does not tell you if
and when you are finished: at one point, which seems randomly assigned to different
playthroughs, a chat window pops up and you are asked whether you think you
understood. If so, you can leave the station. In playing the game, there are multiple
layers of probing present that highlight the personal nature of the narrative and the
ambiguous empathy for the character Hannah. The first layer is the police asking
Hannah questions, some of which she clearly does not want to answer, which is
turned into a database perfect for digging through information. The second layer is the
character searching through the database, enabled by the player’s actions. There is
clearly a character in the story world trying to figure out what happened in this police
case. Related to this is the final layer of the player his or herself actually typing in the
words and watching the videos, not only to find out the truth, but also to let the plot
unfold. This plot consists of both the narrative that Hannah lays out throughout the
videos and figuring out what the place of the character searcher is in the plot.
The game’s narrative takes place 25 years ago, yet the interactivity of the player
resembles a kind of probing that reflects “social media stalking”, something to be
slightly ashamed of while at the same time a commonplace activity. You’re confronted
with your own assumptions and frames through your search record. When we all too
readily hypothesized that someone might’ve had an affair, Hannah reproached us:
“you’re reaching here. Why are you so obsessed with sex and affairs?” Her Story is not
interactive in the collaborative sense of Dictionary of a Revolution. It is dialogic. It asks
you foremost to pay attention. You train empathic engagement as you imagine this
woman’s motivations. The database form again is social, but more than the other two
examples, it is so as an exercise of the imagination. It in any case becomes clear that
the role of stories, in the plural, is especially important in this database text. But it is a
form of storytelling that hinges on gaps, omissions, negative space, as its creator has
pointed out. It's about framing and shifting perspectives. Her Story is about inference,
listening, understanding, and empathic identification.
Concluding remarks
Works like these shed light on the various roles that databases play in society—as
storage of information, platforms for dissemination, artistic artifacts, and as
methodological tools for critical thinking about the construction of the database itself.
Bill Seaman argues that:
An embodied approach to computing acknowledges the importance of the
physicality of experience as it falls within the continuum that bridges the physical with
the digital. To illuminate the operative nature of database aesthetics, one needs to
point at a number of human processes – memory, thought, association, cataloging,
categorizing, framing, contextualizing, decontextualizing, and recontextualizing, as
well as grouping. (121)
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Here, our readings of creative databases highlighted at least three functions of
databases amplified by electronic literature. We read Identity Swap Database as a
reflection on online appropriation of identity and data use, A Dictionary of the
Revolution as a commemoration or preservation that foregrounds ambiguity and
avoids creating a ‘master narrative’; and Her Story as an exercise in empathy that
counteracts the objectifying mode of probing for information. Reading creative
databases as interrogations of their database form allows for insights into the cultural
roles and values present in the current omnipresence of databases in society.
Throughout this paper, we have given double readings of each work, combining
the database systems with individual fragments of the works. In doing so, we have
taken a non-computational approach to show the different modes of reading
necessary to interpret creative works that function as databases. This allows for a
reflection on the database format and its presence in daily and academic life.
Databases are used extensively to apply quantitative methods to literary texts and
bibliographic data, yet these methods are generally ill-equipped to analyze the
database structures themselves. For that, we need close readings in addition to
computation. Creative databases resist classic quantitative methods, yet ask the
reader to be both a close and distant reader in understanding the database system as
an integral part of the interpretation process. This highlights that database structures
are both paramount and taken for granted.
We have seen that, far from being ‘replaced’ by database structures, narrativity in
each case has an important role to play: this remains the most implicit in the Identity
Swap Database, where the ‘story’ of an invented character needs to be inferred and
imaginatively filled in by the viewer. Her Story contains a collection of fictional,
personal stories, and A Dictionary of the Revolution has amassed and categorized
more public, political stories that are non-fictional. What we do indeed see in the latter
two cases, is that, as Van Alphen has put it in Staging the Archive
(2014),
the symbolic form of (syntagmatic) narrativity has a more modest role to
play. It is no longer the encompassing framework in which all kinds of
information is embedded, but the other way around. It is in the
encompassing framework of archival organizations that (small) narratives
are embedded. (12)
In further research, we seek to develop something like a database criticism to
function along the lines of Geert Lovink’s internet criticism, as parallel to literary and
theatre criticism. Database criticism implies readership and aesthetic judgement and
approaches the database as cultural artifact. How does one read the database
hermeneutically? By emphasizing the acts of reading, studying, and evaluating
databases, we transcend the idea of them as a preparatory task. This allows for a
more inclusive vision of the importance and multifarious functions of publicly available
databases in this field.
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London: Reaktion Books.
Barlow, S. (2015). Her Story. [Videogame].
Bolter, J. D., Grusin R. (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
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the Database in Electronic Literature
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[Scientific Articles]
Ackermans H., van de Ven I.
Electronic Literature in the Database and
the Database in Electronic Literature
© Communications. Media. Design, Vol. 4, №4, 2019 17
СЕТЕВАЯ ЛИТЕРАТУРА В БАЗАХ ДАННЫХ И
БАЗЫ ДАННЫХ В СЕТЕВОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ
Аннотация:
В связи с тем, что информация постоянно устаревает, практика архивирования
описания и создания баз данных играет жизненно важную роль, чтобы
гарантировать, что художники и ученые могут продолжать развивать и
понимать ту или иную область практики и исследований. С этой целью в рамках
исследовательских проектов разрабатываются множество баз данных сетевой
литературы.В цифровых гуманитарных науках создание баз данных слишком
часто рассматривается лишь как подготовительная часть. Однако, по мнению
разработчиков базы данных сетевой литературы — это одновременно и
исследовательское пространство, и форма распространения, и культурный
артефакт сам по себе. Базы данных ни в коем случае не являются обычными
контейнерами, они исполняют разнообразные процессы, включая хранение,
распределение и экспозицию. Научная деятельность и художественная
практика переплетаются: ученые предпринимают попытки описать и
исследовать данную область. Художники обращаются к базам данных в своих
работах, и производство баз данных еще больше развивает эту область, что
расширяет производство (делает его более разнообразным) и
распространение сетевой литературы.В данной статье рассматривается, как
форма базы данных все больше влияет на сетевую литературу, проникает в
неё и приобретает собственную эстетику. Мы составили исследовательскую
подборку в базе знаний ELMCIP (Electronic Literature as a Model for Creativity in
Practice), состоящую из работ, которые являются свидетельством того, что они
являются частью базы данных, принимая ее формальные характеристики. В
данной статье мы рассматриваем, как переплетаются научная деятельность и
художественная практика: ученые пытаются описать и исследовать область, а
художники обращаются к базе данных в своих произведениях, производство
баз данных, в свою очередь, развивает эту область, что приводит к созданию
более разнообразной сетевой литературы.Мы анализируем три произведения
сетевой литературы: "Пункт подбора идентичности" Оли Лялиной, Heath
Bunting (1999), Dictionary of the Revolution (2017) Амира Ханафи, Her Story (2016)
Акерман А.
Аспирант Бергенского университета
(Берген, Норвегия)
Hannah.Ackermans@uib.no
ван де Вен И.
PhD, доцент Тилбургского университета
(Тилбург, Нидерланды)
I.G.M.vdVen@uvt.nl
[Scientific Articles]
Ackermans H., van de Ven I.
Electronic Literature in the Database and
the Database in Electronic Literature
18 !© Communications. Media. Design, Vol. 4, №4, 2019
Сэм Барлоу. Будучи встроенными в базу данных, эти работы отражают их
различные роли в цифровой культуре. Наш анализ прольет свет на
многообразие ролей, которые играют базы данных в области электронной
литературы, как то: хранилище информации, платформы для распространения,
художественные артефакты, а также как методологический инструмент для
критического осмысления построения самой области. В частности, мы
акцентируем внимание на трех функциях баз данных, которые усиливаются
сетевой литературой: размышление об онлайн-присвоении идентичности и
использовании данных; увековечение или сохранение; и тренировка эмпатии.
Ключевые слова: сетевая литература, базы данных, теория медиа,
нарратив, цифровые гуманитарные науки
