"Database as a Symbolic Form"
Manovich, Lev. "Database as a Symbolic Form."
SummaryIn this essay, Manovich discusses the relationship between database and narrative. He begins by asking why new media favors database form over others as well as questioning the relationship between database narrative. In "The Database Logic," he calls the internet a database and later addressed issues of interactive narrative. He argues that the database is "a new symbolic form of a computer age . . . a new way to structure our experience of ourselves and of the world" (1). He later explains how a database may be seen as a messy list, while narratives have ordered lists with a clear route to follow (5). Manovich then looks at the concepts of paradigm and syntagm and how new media flips these ideas (8). Instead of syntagm being explicit and paradigm implicit, the paradigm (database) is given material existence and the syntagm (narrative) is de-materialized. Specifically he says, "The narrative is constructed by linking elements of this database in a particular order . . . On the material level, a narrative is just a set of links; the elements themselves remain stored in the database" (9).
In sum, Manovich compares and analyzes two opposite forms of cultural expression: narrative (today's dominating form of cultural expression, privileged by novel and cinema) and the database (collection of individual items/data, privileged by the computer age). He argues that since the world appears to us as an endless, unstructured collection of data, it is fitting that we model it as a database. ResponseWhen thinking about the term "database," prior to reading Manovich I typically thought only of a computer database. Thus, the idea of a database as a unordered list or narrative was initially an odd theory to consider.
People tend to want to mold things into narratives to make sense of the content we're grappling with, so Manovich's narrative/database discussion makes sense to me. I wonder how we might bring our students into the conversation. Manovich's article here gives us as teachers a way to help students see a variety of seemingly "dead," static objects as living narratives. Connections/QuestionsManovich says the internet has anti-narrative logic associated with it. It’s not a story, as new elements are being added over time. Can we ever view databases as narratives if they keep changing?
Manovich uses the standard definition of a narrative by Mieke Bal which comes from literary theory. Is this definition too narrow for new media? Further, Manovich says, “In the world of new media, the word narrative is often used as all-inclusive term, to cover up the fact that we have not yet developed a language to describe these new strange objects.” (6). Do we have such a language yet? Why does New Media favor the database when New Media itself is unordered? How might we consider the production of database as meaning making? Might an example of a database as a cultural form be a museum? |
Key Quotes
"Many new media objects do not
tell stories; they don't have beginning or end; in fact, they don't have any development, thematically,
formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence" (1).
"The user experience of such computerized collections [databases] is therefore quite distinct from reading a narrative or watching a film or navigating an architectural site" (1).
"Any process or task is reduced to an algorithm" (3) ... "And any object in the world — be it the population of a city, or the weather over the course of a century, a chair, a human brain — is modeled as a data structure, i.e. data organized in a particular way for efficient search and retrieval" (4).
"As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list" (5).
"Some media objects explicitly follow database logic in their structure while others do not; but behind the surface practically all of them are databases. In general, creating a work in new media can be understood as the construction of an interface to a database. In the simplest case, the interface simply provides the access to the underlying database" (5).
"The "user" of a narrative is traversing a database, following links between its records as established by the database's creator" (6).
"New media reverses this relationship. Database (the paradigm) is given material existence, while narrative (the syntagm) is de-materialised. Paradigm is privileged, syntagm is downplayed. Paradigm is real, syntagm is virtual" (8).
"Although the user is making choices at each new screen, the end result is a linear sequence of screens which she follows. This is the classical syntagmatic experience. In fact, it can be compared to constructing a sentence in a natural language. Just as a language user constructs a sentence by choosing each successive word from a paradigm of other possible words, a new media user creates a sequence of screens by clicking on this or that icon at each screen" (9).
"We want new media narratives, and we want these narratives to be different from the narratives we saw or read before" (12).
"The user experience of such computerized collections [databases] is therefore quite distinct from reading a narrative or watching a film or navigating an architectural site" (1).
"Any process or task is reduced to an algorithm" (3) ... "And any object in the world — be it the population of a city, or the weather over the course of a century, a chair, a human brain — is modeled as a data structure, i.e. data organized in a particular way for efficient search and retrieval" (4).
"As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list" (5).
"Some media objects explicitly follow database logic in their structure while others do not; but behind the surface practically all of them are databases. In general, creating a work in new media can be understood as the construction of an interface to a database. In the simplest case, the interface simply provides the access to the underlying database" (5).
"The "user" of a narrative is traversing a database, following links between its records as established by the database's creator" (6).
"New media reverses this relationship. Database (the paradigm) is given material existence, while narrative (the syntagm) is de-materialised. Paradigm is privileged, syntagm is downplayed. Paradigm is real, syntagm is virtual" (8).
"Although the user is making choices at each new screen, the end result is a linear sequence of screens which she follows. This is the classical syntagmatic experience. In fact, it can be compared to constructing a sentence in a natural language. Just as a language user constructs a sentence by choosing each successive word from a paradigm of other possible words, a new media user creates a sequence of screens by clicking on this or that icon at each screen" (9).
"We want new media narratives, and we want these narratives to be different from the narratives we saw or read before" (12).