DataX Book Launch-The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats

Daniel Scott Snelson presents a book talk on his recently published The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats (University of Minnesota Press, 2025). Snelson explores how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host and how these transformations might help us better understand our own private collections in turn. He develops creative tools and contingent methods for reading cultural data, whether found in public-facing repositories on the internet or in our own collections of TXT, JPG, MP3, and MOV artifacts. Within and beyond the project, experimental poetic interludes give readers practical entry points into the creative practice of producing new meanings in any given little database. Inventive and interdisciplinary, The Little Database grapples with the digitized afterlives of cultural objects, playing with the way in which the past is continually reconfigured to shape the present.