Manovich - Database as Symbolic Form (Abstract)
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back to student module: Seminar Change of Media (SoSe 2008), Hypertext and database
In his text “Database as a symbolic form”, Lev Manovich discusses, amongst others, the relation between database and narrative. Therefore, regarding our topic hypertext and database, a brief summary of what Lev Manovich sais about database and narrative is to be found below:
Database is the correlation of the computer age and it becomes the center of the creative process in the computer age. Many new media objects are collections of individual items. In computer sience database is defined as a structured collection of data. There are different types of databases, namely hierarchical, network, relational and object-oriented, and each uses different models to organize data. Dadabases in their basic sense appear as a collection of items om which the user can perform various operations: view, navigate, search. A database is a new way to structure our experience of ourselves and of the world. Examples for databases are multimedia encyclopedias as well as other commercial CD-ROM titles which are collections as well - of recipes, quotations, photographs, and so on. Where the database form really flourished, however, is on the Internet. As defined by original HTML, a web page is a sequential list of seperate elements: text blocks, images, digital video clips, and links to other pages. A site of a web-bases TV or radio station, for example, offers a collection of video or audio programms along with the option to listen to the current broadcast; but this current programm is just one choice among many other programs stored on the site. Thus the traditional broadcasting experience, which consisted solely of a real-time transmission, becomes ust one element in a collection of options. The open nature of the Web as medium means that the Web sites never have to be complete; and they rarely are. It is as easy to add new elements to the end of a list as it is to insert them anywhere in it. If new elements are being added over time, the result is a collection, not a story. As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items ans it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrarive creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive tight to make meaning out of the world. A number of records linked together so that more than one trajectory is possible, is assumed to be constitute “interactive narrative”. Another erroneous assumption frequently made is that by creating her own path (i.e.. chooseing the recorods from a database in a particular order) the user constructs her own unique narrative. However, database and narrative do not have the same status in computer culture. In the database / narrative pair, database is the unmarked term. Narrative is more or less explicit, like syntagmatic, whereas database is implicit, like a paradigm. On the material level, a narrative is just a set of links; the elements themselves remain stored in the database. It is not surprising, then, that databases occupy a significant, if not the largest, territory of the new media landscape. What is more surprising is why the other end of the spectrum - narratives- still exist in new media.
