The Little Database

A Poetics of Media Formats

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Daniel Scott Snelson

The Little Database explores how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host. Grappling with the digitized afterlives of cultural objects, Daniel Scott Snelson shows how the past is continually reconfigured to shape the present. He invites readers to find playful and personal means for unpacking their own data collections, in the process discovering idiosyncratic ways to explore and connect with digital archives.

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Colliding clumps of digital static in shades of pink and green form the background. Title in black at top, subtitle repeated vertically on the left.

Background image by bill bissett, from words in th fire (Vancouver: Blewointment, 1972)

Table of Contents

Index Index

  • Black cover spread feature title on right in large text with mirrored images of a hand pointing at a document labeled Index on the left.

    Introduction

    by Daniel Scott Snelson

    Index Index is a 265-page book featuring 99 pages of generative media poetics and a comprehensive index to 16 related texts, querying the role of the index in an age of synthetic cognition. Here we present the introduction to Index Index and make available the full text to download as a PDF.

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Metadata

  • rights
    This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, and the UCLA Library.

    Excerpts from “The Defective Record” by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939, copyright 1938 by New Directions, reprinted by permission of New Directions and Carcanet Press. Excerpts from Stan VanDerBeek, Poemfield #2, copyright 1971 Estate of Stan VanDerBeek.

    A portion of chapter 1 was previously published in a different form in “EXE TXT: Textwarez & Deformance,” in Code und Konzept: Literatur und das Digitale, ed. Hannes Bajohr (Berlin: Frohmann), copyright 2016 by Daniel Scott Snelson. A portion of chapter 3 was previously published in a different form in “Live Vinyl MP3: Mutant Sounds, PennSound, UbuWeb, SpokenWeb,” Amodern 4: The Poetry Series, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, copyright 2015 by Daniel Scott Snelson. A portion of chapter 4 was previously published in “Incredible Machines: Following People Like Us into the Database,” Avant, June 4, 2014.

    Copyright 2025 Daniel Scott Snelson. The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/