The Little Database

A Poetics of Media Formats

Daniel Scott Snelson

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Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

University of Minnesota Press
24 June 2025

Literary theory; Automation of library & information processes; Media studies

Series: Electronic Mediations

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.

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By: Daniel Scott Snelson
Imprint: University of Minnesota Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 7mm
Weight: 312g
ISBN: 9781517918828
ISBN 10: 1517918820
Series: Electronic Mediations
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 24 June 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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

Daniel Scott Snelson is a writer, editor, archivist, and assistant professor in the departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, where he also serves as faculty with the Digital Humanities Program, the UCLA Game Lab, and the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies. He is author of multiple volumes of experimental poetry and poetics, including Elden Poem, Apocalypse Reliquary, and EXE TXT.

Reviews for The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats

""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