Databases and digital writing

The topic for this week’s class discussion is Database and Digital Fiction. The readings assigned were Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overload by Victoria Vesna; “The Unworkable Interface” from by Galloway Alexander and “Database” by Paul Christiane. The prompt for this week’s blog entry is on the relationship between database and narrativity and what this means for digital writing.

            In printed literature databases are something that the author is not necessarily thinking about before the act of writing. In digital writing that is not necessarily the case. The author at the moment of the artistic production has to keep many different factors in mind. One of them is the database. Paul Christiane in “Database” explains: “A database, now commonly understood as a computerized record-keeping system is a structured collection of data which stands in the tradition of ‘data containers’…” (127). For digital writers, it is important to understand how their information is going to be stored, not necessarily to safeguard their work. It is important to point out here that many digital authors/artists, contrary to authors of printed literature, are not preoccupied with the idea of their work been ephemeral.  Digital artists nonetheless are faced with the idea that their work, depending in the medium or platform they used, might be accessible or not to many of their readers.

            It is thus, that for digital writing, databases become essential, not so much for the desire of the author to preserve his/her work, but for those readers that would like to have access to it. It is then, that one can say that the figure of the reader becomes much more important than one might have anticipated and that the preservation of the digital work is vital to the creation and classification of a realm of digital writing.

            The reader of electronic literature is not necessarily a literature enthusiastic; it can also refer to a critic. The world of digital literature is growing and thus it becomes important for critics of this medium to preserve the works that contribute and help expand this form of writing. Victoria Vesna in Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overload bring to mind the role of the museums and their struggle to preserve the art. Whit this example in mind, it is not difficult to understand why it is also important to preserve and safeguard digital writing even if it stands against the values or views of the authors itself.