ARIN 6912Week 8

Databases

Tuesday 5.00pmAngela Wade

Databasing the World: Biodiversity and the

2000s

By Geoffrey Bowker, 2005

This is where it came from:

• Winner, 2007 Ludwig Fleck Prize given by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).

• Awarded "Best Information Science Book 2006" by the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).

Question 1:

How many times did you consult

the dictionary?

This reading was deep ...

And it was mostly to do withplants ... which are supposed

to be peaceful ...My brain hurts ... a lot ...

The 3 epigraphs1. The Mahabharata – what was once there is no longer

- dealing with the past- the nature of existence and death

2. Boulter - how and what data is stored (fossil plants)- asserts all will be the same- present day tools will recreate the past perfectly, uniformly

3. Douglas – how humans adapt to a new represented system

- there’s a politics and reality to colonisation- entities become more and less real, a manageable form, when

categorised

Database:A large volume of information stored in a computer and organised in categories to facilitate retrieval.

Macquarie Dictionary

Statement 1:Perhaps the most powerful technology in our control of the world and each other over the past two hundred years has been the development of the database.

Statement 2:Databases are not a product of the computer revolution; if anything the computer revolution is a product of the drive to database.

Building an Infrastructure:•Need standards when building infrastructures.•Each layer needs own set.•Statistics started - people became more like their categories.

Question 2:Do you think they became more like the categories they were put in or did the categories become

smaller and more in-depth, therefore making them fit the

category?

Building an Infrastructure:•Best standards don’t always win.•Positive externalities.•Many infrastructure models exist.•Interoperability the key.•Doomed research – info lost.

Building an Infrastructure:•No storage medium is permanent so requires continued maintenance.•And reliable metadata from different technologies.•More info you provide, more work have to do.

Ownership:1. Control of knowledge

- who has the right to speak on behalf of a group?- flattening of knowledge hierarchies a powerful social force

2. Privacy- possible to generate and search large databases- some believe privacy days are over

3. Patterns of ownership- privatisation of knowledge – who owns it?- sometimes forget the role of traditional knowledge

Sharing Data:•Reusable.•Drive for an imperial archive.•Protocols – what’s put in and what’s left out just as important.•How to deal with old data – need to preserve original in good form.

International technoscience:•Narrowing of knowledge gap.•Breakdown of digital divide.•Faster research and publishing cycles.•Holding onto old ways.

Accounting for Life:•Importance of the human memory as storage device.•Classifications needed for greater flexibility.•First databases hierarchical – dependent on what ordered entered.•We now have more flexible databases.

Accounting for Life:•Derrida in Archive Fear – developing new computer technologies creates new traces and new archives meaning a new past.

Question 3:Does the nature of the

technology used either directly or analogically produce changes

in our representation and understanding of the past?

To wrap up:•Now have the technology to build a useful archive.•The nature of record keeping – development can be sparked equally by social forces or scientific developments.•Thus technology does not have logical preference in driving science and society, which do not drive the technology.

Database as aGenre of

New Media

By Lev Manovich 2000

•Apart from the shocking grammatical errors

‘After the expression its correlate – database.’‘... easy to add new elements to the end of list as it is to

insert them anywhere in it.’‘... offers a collections of video or audio programs ...’‘Texts need to written ... and audio need to be recorded.’‘... is assumed to be constitute “interactive narrative.”’

this article was interesting.

Question 4:

What is the relationshipbetween database

and narrative?

The Database Logic:•Database is defined as a structured collection of data.•Organised for fast search and retrieval by a computer.•Anything but a simple collection of items.

The Database Logic:•Different types of databases:

- Hierarchical- Network- Relational- Object-oriented

•All use different methods to organise data.

The Database Logic:•Collections of items where user can view, navigate, and search.•Both articles talked about the world and life as a database, archiving life.

The Database Logic:•Multimedia works with ‘cultural’ aspects favour database form.•Database as a form flourished on the internet.•Web offers fertile ground – three dimensional and interactive.

Data and Algorithm:•Not all new media are databases – computer games as narrative.•Is data passive, algorithm active?•Not quite true – data needs to be generated.

Data and Algorithm:•‘Storage mania’•Reality > Media > Data > Database•Every site is a type of database•The map is now bigger than the territory

Database and Narrative:•Database – the world as a list of items, refuse to put in an order.•Narrative – creates cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items.•Natural enemies.

Database and Narrative:•Databases have become the centre of the creative process in the computer age.•User of a narrative is traversing a database.•Arbitrary sequence of database records is not a narrative.

To wrap up:•Database and narrative don’t have same status in computer culture.•New media objects are all databases.•A database can support narrative.

Further Readings

Bartlett, Thomas (2007), ‘Archive Fever’ in The Chronicle of Higher Education (online). Volume 53, Issue 46, Page A8, 20 July 2007. Available: http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i46/46a00801.htm [Accessed 24 April 2009].

Derrida, Jacques (1995). Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Hacking, Ian (1995). Rewriting the Soul, New Jersey, Princeton University Press.

MIT Press article on Memory Practices in the Sciences. Available: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10613 [Accessed 26 April 2009].

Wikipedia article on APIs (mentioned in Bowker). Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API [Accessed 27 April 2009].

Further Readings

Ford, Paul (2006), ‘Privacy in Cyberspace: Is it Possible?’ on National Public Radio America (online), 20 January 2006. Available: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5165536 [Accessed 18 April 2009].