Category: Group C

In July of 2007, J.K. Rowling published the final book of her Harry Potter series. It was amazing conclusion to a fantastic series, but it was also difficult for fans to come to terms with the fact that the series was now over. Four years later, Rowling brought new hope to her fans with the launch of Pottermore – an online database of her never-before-seen writing about characters, places and plots.

As Lev Manovich points out in The Language of New Media, databases are typically thought of as a radical departure from the narrative form, as they are searchable and arbitrarily organized. However, the original Pottermore site brought narrative form to the database by requiring users to move through a Hogwarts storyline to unlock database objects. For example, if you wanted to know more about where Rowling drew inspiration in creating Professor McGonagall, you had to attend transfiguration class and click on McGonagall rather than simply searching for her. To unlock further levels and progress through the site, you had to get sorted into a house and play flash games. This created a more stimulating user experience than simply clicking through a collection of wiki entries containing Rowling’s thoughts.

While many younger people found this organization of the site entertaining, adults often found the simple flash games a nuisance that stood between them and immersion in the real lifeblood of the Harry Potter universe, Rowling’s writing. As such, Pottermore has since been reorganized into a more traditional, wiki-style database, albeit a beautiful and extremely well designed database.

Posted from DIG101 Blog by Noah R.

Wow this article was confusing. I may not have the prior knowledge to fully follow all of Manovich’s points, but one point that did stick was the one on video games. Highly academic of me I know. I Manovick has the beginnings of  a decent argument when it comes to narrative masking the algorithm of games. He is correct that because of the story we often overlook how the game itself functions. This a true point and a bizarre point. It seems obvious that the narrative is suppose to take our primary attention. I don’t think that it takes away from the actual experience of the game itself at all.

I don’t really see his point in this section though as he more just states facts. Yes, there are different kinds of games, that is why we have created different genres for them. Manovich goes on about the differences between algorithms, narrative games and logic games, but doesn’t really say why. The differences seem fairly straightforward. To add onto that I think he actually simplifies games down too much to fit his groups. Plenty of games have little mini games built into them. One example is hacking in fallout 4. The hacking system is a very straightforward word creating game that would fit into Manovich’s algorithm category. But fallout as a whole is a very different style of game.

Manovich could’ve made the argument that we often overlook the important aspect of games themselves. He could’ve said that video games are not as free and expressive as we like to think they are. That in reality we are following these codes and simply tricking ourselves into thinking we have some sort of freedom through the context of the narrative. That is a perfectly valid point that he starts to make, but never fully says. Instead he jumps to the next topic. I understand he wasn’t focused on this per say but I felt like he did this in many other sections where he’d simply start a point and move onto the next without creating any closure.

Posted from My blog by Patrick H.

If you’re anything like me, the experience of grocery shopping at Harris Teeter is akin to navigating a database. Harris Teeter’s aisles serve as categories (Produce, Dairy, International, etc.) that contain lists of items (parsley, eggs, salsa). Of course, I choose the order in which I engage with these categories (I usually go to Produce first, then make my way across the store—maybe this is my own algorithm of sorts), but my experience could hardly be construed as narrative. Manovich points out that an arbitrary linear sequence does not on its own constitute a narrative. So perhaps grocery stores appeal to database logic?

Manovich contends that the database is the key form of cultural expression of the computer age, eclipsing the narrative as articulated through literature and cinema. Because this is a blog post and the stakes are relatively low, I’d like to make an ambitious theoretical maneuver: perhaps the database is the favored form of cultural expression because it better coheres with neoliberal ideas of market and consumer.

Indeed, the “storage mania” that Manovich cites seems predicated on the idea of data as property; the accumulation of data is desirable, then, because it corresponds with the accumulation of capital. In this paradigm, narrative becomes undesirable insofar as it is a smaller container than a database. I admit that this assumption is tenuous: Are fewer data stored in a novel than in an encyclopedia? I don’t know.

Similarly, consumerism relies on paradigmatic ways of thinking and rejects syntagmatic ones. The paradigmatic generates consumer desire by underlying the accessibility of choice and infinite possibility. I can, for example, browse a dozen different online retailers (databases) to find the perfect pair of shoes. Because the syntagmatic emphasizes what is present, rather than alternate possibilities, it is less compatible with consumer ideals.

These are obviously some big ideas with a lot of assumptions that should be unpacked, but I think the connection between databases and market capitalism is worth exploring.

Posted from Digital Studies by Hannah L.

Databases and narratives are interesting to compare to each other because of how they differ, but also how similar they are.  Let’s think about the ways in which they are similar to each other.  Databases are made as an encyclopedia of different sources, whether it be pictures, words, letters, or anything that can be categorized.  Meanwhile, narratives take the elements that are used in a database and makes sense out of them.

It’s comprehensible to seethe benefits of each of these categories of forms of literature (databases and narratives)  Starting with the database, a list of items make up a database for no real reason at all except to inform the user base of an encyclopedia for example.  In an English encyclopedia, one can find the meanings, etymologies, function, and pronunciation of a word.  This is good for learning how to speak, read, and write in English.  However one might want to see these words in context, and therefore can go to a narrative, which has those words used in sentences, and are used to drive a certain plot, which I and most other people think is more entertaining and intellectually stimulating than an encyclopedia.

However when thinking about these two categories of literature, we have to acknowledge that databases have ultimately come before narratives.  In other words, before people could make rhetoric out of the words they were using, the words would have to have been made, which would have been written down in encyclopedias.  Below I have a video posted comparing databases and narratives that could possibly further our conversation of this topic of the language of media.

Posted from My blog by Will M.

I found the Manovich article very confusing, and I am not entirely sure that I correctly understood the point of the article. If I am correct, the main point is that interactions with media that used to be “narrative” or “story” based have now lost their narrative element due to the nature of databases and mass media.

Manovich uses the “antinarrative logic of the web” as one example, stating “If new elements are being added over time, the result is a collection, not a story. Indeed, how can one keep a coherent narrative or any other development trajectory through the material if it keeps changing?” (Manovich 2010). As a counter example to Manovich’s argument, simply look at the ancient Greek oral storytelling tradition. The Trojan War occurred around 1200 BCE, yet the Homerian epics were not written until the 700s BCE.

Source: https://giphy.com/gifs/11W78Fy059zQKQ

Prior to Homer, the story of the Trojan War was recounted solely through spoken word, with little additions and subtractions to the story occurring frequently. One can argue that the factuality of the story suffered from this, but to say that the Homerian epics did not “keep a coherent narrative or any other development trajectory” before Homer wrote them down would be a foolish claim. Narratives can maintain consistent storylines even with constant additions, meaning that websites can maintain a narrative feature in spite of their malleable nature.

I am not claiming that all websites are always consistent, indeed, the inclusion of The Undefeated on ESPN’s website marked a change in the direction of their narrative. But some websites remain unchanging, ever faithful to their story and their narrative.

Sources:

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2010.

My source of knowledge about the Trojan War is my Classics 280 course.

Posted from My DIG 101 Blog by Matt B.

“The Database” by Lev Manovich left me wondering what it is I had just learned about. For me, the entire piece was confusing, probably due to my extremely limited understanding of databases and “new media” to begin with. But one thing that left me particularly confused was the relationship between databases and narratives.

Essentially, I understood that a database was a collection, while a narrative was a story. Manovich explains that “the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events)” (pg 224). Because of these definitions, he says, databases are enemies with narratives. This dichotomy made sense to me.

That is until Manovich says that “regardless of whether new media objects present themselves as linear narratives, interactive narratives…they are all databases” (pg 228). How can a narrative be both a database and an enemy of a database?

The relationship became even more confusing when Manovich began discussing databases and narratives in terms of paradigms and syntagms. This description made it seem like the two things were very intertwined, and that one came out of the other’s existence. He says that “the database of choices from which narrative is constructed (the paradigm) is explicit, while the actual narrative (the syntagm) is explicit. New media reverse this relationship” (230).

To me, the author is trying to argue that narratives and databases are simultaneously opposites, symbiotic, and in competition. Is this what he actually meant, or am I missing the link between all of these relationships?

This image of a crocodile and a bird somewhat illustrates this confusion. It is a symbiotic relationship, but the two animals seem like they would actually be enemies. Is this what Manovich was trying to say?

Posted from Digital Studies 101 by Alivia

There are bots that tweet random sentences, bots that report earthquakes, bots that report journalistically on congress, bots that spread false information, bots that encourage political transparency, bots that do nothing other than appear comically inhuman, and bots that perform so many other varied functions on the internet (particularly twitter). The article “How to Think About Bots” mentions several of these bot species, for lack of a better phrase, in its analysis of the bot infested social media world we now live in. Yet the article does not come up with a seemingly obvious conclusion. If the bot world is so complex and varied, shouldn’t we just deal with them on a case by case basis???

The authors state, “Platforms, governments and citizens must step in and consider the purpose, and future, of bot technology,” as if some legislature or rulebook could possibly cover all possible actions bots will make in the future (Wooley, Boyd, & Broussard 2016). The truth is, it is impossible to predict precisely what semi-autonomous bots will do, and this ambiguity makes any type of preemptive policy pointless. A better solution would simply mirror the steps taken towards the accounts of actual humans who tweet dangerous or libelous things.

Source: https://leapfroggr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/new-twitter-account-suspended.png

If a real person tweets something incredibly offensive or blatantly false, Twitter can simply look at the tweet as a case by case event and delete the tweet. If the real person repeatedly tweets inappropriate material, Twitter can suspend the account. Why not follow the same steps towards bots? If a bot tweets something illegal, Twitter can delete it. If it keeps tweeting illegal things, Twitter can delete the account.

Sources:

Wooley, Samuel, et al. “How to Think About Bots.” Motherboard, 23 Feb. 2016, motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkzpdm/how-to-think-about-bots.

Posted from My DIG 101 Blog by Matt B.