1. Database as Symbolic Form
Prof. Alvarado
MDST 3703/7703
2 October 2012

2. Business
• If you are still having problems with JEdit or
Home Directory, please see me
• We will continue with JavaScript and jQuery
on Thursday

3. Review
• Ayers’ experiment is to create an online essay
that takes advantage of being digital
– Use of hypertext
– Direct access to supporting primary and
secondary sources
• Does it succeed?
– Why or why not?

4. Missed Opportunities
• Does not resolve the tension between
database and narrative
– And does not exploit mediating structures – e.g.
the categories
• Possible hindrances:
– Conservative nature of historians
– Hypertext theory tends to conflate the stack of
scholarship

5. The Stack of Scholarship
ARGUMENTS ESSAYS HYPERTEXT
MAGIC MIDDLE
Work,
Memory
Programs,
Maps, etc.
COLLECTIONS LIBRARIES DATABASES

6. But how are the conflicting requirements
between database and narrative to be
mediated?
What is a good example?

7. Vertov, theorized by Manovich, gives us
a starting point

8. Lev Manovich is professor of Visual Arts, University of
California, San Diego, U.S. and European Graduate School
in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he teaches new media art.
A native Russian, Manovich worked in the software
industry before turning to academia.

9. David Abelevich Kaufman (aka
Dziga Vertov) was a Soviet
pioneer of documentary film,
newsreel director and cinema
theorist.

11. Let’s begin with structuralism
(related to semiotics and semiology, the
study of “signs”)

13. Structuralism is a theory culture
Culture comprises the products of human
labor – intellectual and physical -- as well as
the psychological and social formations that
make this labor possible*
*for these, too, are partly created by human labor

14. The visible products of human culture – works
of art, language, institutions, etc. – are the
results of hidden structures that generate
visible behaviors
The best example of this is language
Our speech – the observable part of language
– is governed by grammar, or structure, a
hidden set of codes and rules that exist in the
brain and shared by a community

15. As with language, cultural structures consist of
categories whose meanings derive from their position
and contrast with other terms
For example, phonemes are joined in sequences to
form words or parts of speech

16. Structures are called paradigmatic
Sequences are called syntagmatic
Paradigm and Syntagm are like the X
and Y axes in a geometry of culture …

18. Paradigm and syntagm can be used to describe
things like food and fashion
Each “system” has a paradigmatic code that is
“executed” to generate syntagmatic products

19. Each day you dress you are executing a code

20. Probably the
most famous
structural analysis
of fashion

21. Paradigm / Syntagm
PARADIGM
• The level of “structure”
• Elements
• Spatial
• Order does not matter
• Meaning determined by
contrasts between
elements
SYNTAGM
• The level of “events”
• Sequences
• Temporal
• Order matters
• Meaning determined by
what could have been said
as much as by what has
been said
“execution” or “performance”

22. Structuralism defines a Stack of Culture
EVENT (syntagm)
PERFORMANCE (following rules)
STRUCTRE (paradigm)

23. Structuralism can be used to describe the
media forms studied and created by scholars
Books and paintings, for example, are
syntagmatic expressions of cultural
paradigms
However, these cultural forms present only
syntagm, not paradigm

24. Paradigm (hidden)
syntagm

25. Yaxchilan lintel 24
The lintel depicts an actual blood-
letting rite that took place on 26
October 709.
King Shield Jaguar is shown holding
a torch as Queen Lady Xoc draws a
barbed rope through her pierced
tongue.
The surrounding text locates the
event within the Mayan calendar
system.
The paradigmatic basis of this art
is what cultural archaeologists
seek to reconstruct

26. Digital media are different
Paradigm can be exposed as well
This is a big deal

27. In other words, when an artist creates a
story, painting, or film, the paradigmatic
parts – notes, index cards, raw footage -- are
usually lost
Thrown away or in the head
But with digital media, this stuff becomes
part of the work itself

28. In a game like
Civilization IV,
the
“Civilopedia”
governs play
The “board” is the
interface to the
database

29. In a game like Skyrim, the database
underlies all decisions

30. The game is an interface to the database

31. Playing the game is interacting with the database

32. The database is foregrounded and constant,
whereas the narrative – the outcome of
playing – is variable and ephemeral

33. This is true of most games – this is how you
create something in Minecraft

34. Manovich’s argument is that with digital
media, paradigm is both materialized and
foregrounded, and this shapes how we think
One effect is that digital media make
narrative problematic
(media determinism again)

38. Rationalization Effects
• All cultural forms are like interfaces to
databases
– Where database = paradigm
• How we interact with paradigm is therefore
like how computers interact with data – via
algorithm
– Therefore, behavior is algorithmic

39. A flowchart
expresses a
kind of
algorithm

40. The bacon
algorithm

41. Role of algorithm in computers
• Connects narrative to
database, syntagm to
paradigm
– A set of procedures for
working with a set of
data
• Can be interactive …
Interface
Database
Algorith
m

42. Data structures and algorithms are the
essential topics of computer science
For example, the DOM and JavaScript

43. An algorithm is a machine for generating
narratives
Therefore, the traditional story – telling “the
story” – becomes problematic

44. Narrative
• Narratives oppose database logic
– Order matters
– There is a “sense of an ending”
• The “database” is internal, unexposed
– In the head of the author
• The result of an internal algorithm
– The author’s in the act of writing

45. What do film and Vertov have to do
with this?

46. Vertov – like Bush with microfilm – realized that film
can be used to capture the process and sources of
its own creation. Because of is plasticity, it can
represent paradigm …