Scientific: a structured collection of data

General: collection of items on which the user can perform various operations: view, navigate, search. The content and the interface, way of experiencing it, is separate.

(example Site map http://www.amnesty.org/sitemap/) 

A, contemporary culture is data rich.

Due to use of computer technologies and networks large quantities of data produced and contained by contemporary culture. The problem of making understandings of large quantities of data is cross-disciplinary. (Biochemistry: human genome, commercial interest consumer statistics). The world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database. But it is also appropriate that we would want to develops poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this database.

1. Artists tend to be interested in creating newunderstandings of what happens in culture at large.
2. They have a very good skillset for doing it.

B, The type of data we have now is not linear "in itself". (Manovich)

"After the novel, and subsequently cinema privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate — database. Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don't have beginning or end; in fact, they don't have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other."

C, We don't believe in the Grand Narrative anymore.

It was undermined by postmodernist thought. We know that any history is about connecting the dots and they can be connected in many ways. When the Grand Narrative is not so appealing we are more open to ways of connecting the dots which are not trough a linear narrative.

1, create collections of data

2, classify, organize, present it in various ways in order to examine cultural political and aestetic issues.

database as symbolic form (Manovich):

Paradigmatic vs Syntagmatic dimension.

Classification: Examples of ways of organizing data