I began this project as a paper on the culture of the database. I was curious how databases shape and inform cultural activities performed within their confines. My subject of study was Everything2, a massive cultural project resembling nothing so much as a neoist's Encyclopedia Galactica.
The online dictionary / chatroom / newsgroup / forum that constitutes Everything2 is driven by an extremely flat relational database, and used by a dedicated community of readers and contributors whose goal is to fill that database with as much of the set of all things as is humanly possible. This extends to travel directions, advice columns, biographies, technical specs, song lyrics, film reviews, recipes, political tracts, short fiction, definitions, consumer guides, diary entries, repair instructions, news clips, grammer discussions, sex tips, and so on. There is also an enormous volume of meta-discussion, in which users attempt to lay down conventions of the textual space, ask questions and write recommendations for reading and writing behaviors, deliver manifestos on data-based community citizenship, form alliances, address design problems, comment on the growth of the system and the community as a whole, ad inifinitum.
Like the bulletin boards and forums that began with ARPANET, Everything2 is a system whose active readers are generally active writers. At its heart is open publication model which encourages an epistolary mode of communication. Reading and writing intertwine, fusing into a single cultural activity of perpetuating dialog. Like the famed Slashdot and a host of lesser-known database services (****names*****), Everything2 rewards dialog participation with power. The more a user reads, votes on readings, contributes writings, and receive votes for contributions, the more voting power and administrative (respons)abilities accrue.
While Everything2 is an extreme example, its goal ("everything") is only a slightly more overt in stating a desire common to and perhaps even constitutive of large data storage projects in general: The attempt by a system to reinscribe all of human knowledge [and knowledge work] within that system's confines. This has the twin effects of subjecting knowledge to the laws of the system, while simultaneously objectifying knowledge within that system as objects in an object paradigm. In a data-space, what is known is rendered tangible. Knowledge becomes as concrete in its construction as the walls of a great chapel, and even more vital to the resulting edifice. Indeed, theosophical rhetoric is rampant in Everything2 but common to even the most modest of participatory database structures. In building a container to hold existence, one necessarily articulates visions both of the shape of reality (that which is) and how that shape may be most rigorously and thoroughly or 'completely' expressed through being contained (that which out to be). Reality becomes a fantasy of order as it is poured out of the universe and into its new vessel.
Open source databases (cite?) and data-based communities and projects (from search engines to news services to online libraries) endlessly repeat the desire of the scientific society to unmake and then remake the world. Most recently, the Information Revolution attempts to perform this virtually, creating a new form of existence which humans can enter as participants while at the same time standing outside as creators - a final great exception to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem (fact check-cite), and the final step to godhead.
What interested me about the participatory culture of these databases was the extent to which this desire for mastery of the system is constantly reinscribed as a driving force of system growth, and yet frustrated by the system itself and its decentered network of "authors."(mention them?) Although the desire the joy of an Encyclopedia Galactica which may be entered is the remaking of the world, and consequently the unmaking of the real world, that satisfaction would appear to depend on a particular external vantage point - an interface with the database as other than subject within and to it, an understanding and control over the system as maker and unmaker, irregardless of its laws. Yet in these consensual cultural endeavors, that perspective is not to be had.
Even the creators and administrators of Everything2 are subjects - capable of gaining and also losing "powers" (the ability to exercise more or less force in accordance with how the database decrees force may be excercised) along a sliding scale / continuum. Political blocks of users vie for domination of the system's important documents, mostly the ones which indoctrinate new users into the "purpose" of or significance of the system itself. These power blocks rise and fall, compete openly and replace one another, while dialog and open war reigns over groups of users trying to remake the information landscape into a directed project towards meeting their own designs.
What is remarkable about this information landscape is not just the (sp)laisse faire attitude of the creators, but that from a design standpoint, the built the world like a Victorian clockwork universe, then entered. The creators become subject to the creation, and cede special access to that upper level, entering into a contract in which (like Jesus?) they also walk in the database among its created and yet free-willed user accounts.
(It is remarkable the way that Everything2 has repeated cultural production, like human history replayed at lightspeed…)
As I've remarked, what is striking about this system is that it is a construct and a power fantasy (the name Everything says it all) and also a closed system, a consensual universe. Once entered and inhabited, the universe will be constantly changing, however its laws of operation, its physics cannot be changed (hence Everything2, the new system which was formed to rearticulate the goals of Everything in a new iteration - inventing a new physics in a new universe, and leaving the denizens who wished to remain in the original - which still exists.)
What are the laws of the database?
First, when I say database, I am referring not to the more general sense of (common definition). Nor am I implying the (General article author and usage here). Instead I'm referring to the relational database. (common definition, levels of hierarchy of tight definition). This system is not just a collection of things (as in an excel spreadsheet, a table, a laundry list, even a list of tables of lists) but a continuous world. The distinction is important because, in a world of data storage, any group of data might be called a database - the internet, for example, or the contents of my My Documents directory, might all be called databases. Only relational databases truly address the purposes of the database itself, however - not an archive, but a library - not a place for putting data, but a way of getting it out, a way of manipulating it, and of positioning it in relation to other data.
For a more general understanding of what I am talking about here, see Vannaver Bush. Bush imagined the future of the personal computer, or Memex. Yet the objects that he imagined and their function did not involve an operating system, nor the execution of programs. Instead, Bush envisioned personal (relational!) databases accessible from the desktops of each scientists, scholar and author. Data plus rules of interrelation for Bush was an approximation of human memory, and a personal database was the closest (without cords connecting directly to the brain) that one could possess to a technological prosthetic extension of the human mind itself.
To return to the database.
My interest here is in investigating the laws of the link. Once one understands the basic underlying principles of how databases work, and how these principles may be implemented into instances of databases, what does this physics imply about the cultural activities (and cultural memories / ways of knowing) these systems contain? How are they determined by or in relation to these laws? What does it say about our own understanding of knowledge, memory, and cultural production / transmission (hence storage) that we are subjecting the archive to the laws of the database? If our Encyclopedia Galacticas will not exist as books or even web pages, but as served tabular data?
To begin answering this question, I want to rigorously discuss the laws or physics of the link - the second and most important step in the transformation of data into (relational) database. (the first is table - juxtaposition, although unsigned juxtaposition, in a uniform field. Actually, data typing and some other interesting principles come up here, which I may turn into a side discussion, change the shape of the paper into constant differment, or arrage as Appendix A).
[An Important Disclaimer:]
[When I discuss the link, readers may be tempted to envision it as something not unlike the hypertext link found in web pages. This is a poor analogy at best, and while occasionally useful, can lead to a lot of poor conclusions, such as the idea that the web actually functions as some sort of vast relational database. This is not the case. They lack both unified field and a true link - one which indicates a relationship to a present object. The reason is that in terms of articulated data, the web barely exists on anything like a unified field, and that field is a field of protocols, not storage equivalencies. Machines on the internet to not have common file types, directory structures, or naming systems, let alone equivalently arranged contents at the level of the file or the page. Even such widespread phenomena as the commonly intelligible contents of an HTML file are a shifting cultural convention - NOT an inviolable law of the space those files occupy. (note definition of referential integrity). Furthermore, the 'broken link' is a commonplace of the internet precisely because of this flexibility. In a referentially secure database, to delete an item is to delete all links connecting to and from that item - linking to something which does not exist is as nonsensical in the laws of the database as standing on something which isn't there.]
The link articulates power.
The power or hierarchy articulated by the link can be expressed at the level of the parent, the child, and the sibling or peer. Paternity is monolithic and prolific - a single parent item generates endless children in a related table, while a child item has only one parent in its related table. Similarly, the obligation and anxiety of paternity in the database rests with the child, who stores the memory of the identity of the parent. All children know their parents, yet parents do not know their children. Thus the method of determining a parent is to ask the child. The method of determining the children of a parent is to ask all the children. Parents articulate nothing but themselves.
The system of parent, child, and sibling also expressed in the database terminology of "One-to-many"(parent), "Many-to-one"(child), and "Many-to-many"(sibling). While these first to are pretty clear, the last is perhaps suprising, as one might expect one-to-one. However the possibility of siblings is somewhat difficult to articulate via the link - the closest thing might be unsigned connections leading to and fro - so a strange work-around is required to support peer relationships. Both peers assume the parent position, holding no knowledge of each other's existence. A third table enters into the situation, having no other purpose than to register both two table items as its parent. The joint parents therafter relate to one another via this invisible third party, arriving at equality by way of joint paternity.
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To be clear - I'm not trying to arguing here that the database passes on metaphorical understandings of human relationships - although someone else might certainly attempt to make that case. I'm mapping out the 'physical' properties of the link and how it functions to try and understand what it means to store something in a database - to use something which has been stored in a database - and most importantly, what it means to live and work within a database structure.
(Bring back idea of knowledge workers.)
]
(Relation in the database tables is absolute - a thing is either related to another or it isn't, there is no "sort of related" "nearby" etc.)
- Foucault and the database is mostly either obvious (but cite anyway) or crap.
- The asthetics of the database was a little misguided - this is really the asthetics of data, not of the database. A non-narrative mode of art (and of understanding?).
Perhaps. The thing about the database is that it