What is the opposite of “big” data? In a society where households commonly store personal archives of photos, financial records, and other documents, the “little” database—the personal data collection that is stored and backed up and not accessed frequently—deserves a category of its own. In The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats, Daniel Scott Snelson examines globally accessible little databases, such as Textz, Eclipse, and UbuWeb, explores how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host, and asks how they might help us better understand our own private collections in turn. Snelson is joined in conversation with Vicki Bennett, Craig Dworkin, and Luca Messarra.  Daniel Scott Snelson is a writer, editor, archivist, and assistant professor in the departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, where he also serves as faculty with the Digital Humanities Program, the UCLA Game Lab, and the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies. He is author of multiple volumes of experimental poetry and poetics, including Elden Poem, Apocalypse Reliquary, and EXE TXT.Vicki Bennett is a multidisciplinary British artist working under the name People Like Us. Craig Dworkin is professor of English at the University of Utah.Luca Messarra is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University, and founder of Undocumented Press.EPISODE REFERENCES:Alan Liu, Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the DatabaseJerome McGann and Lisa Samuels, “Deformance and Interpretation" (chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl800/Deformance.pdf)We Edit Life, film (People Like Us/Vicki Bennett; partnership with Lovebytes)Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (Internet Archive, 2024, eds. Luca Messarra, Chris Freeland, Juliya Ziskina)Eclipse, an image-based archive of small press poetry books and magazinesPennSound, a site distributing audio recordings of poetry readingsUbuWeb, a collection of experimental film and video artAllen Institute for AIC4/Colossal Clean Crawled CorpusChristopher Kelty, "The Internet We Could Have Had"L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine (ed. Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews)L≠A≠N≠G≠U≠A≠G≠E magazine (ed. Danny Snelson)Christian Marclay, The ClockJohanna DruckerMemory of the World archiveFuture Knowledge podcastRory McCartney and Charlie Morgan, Heated Words: Searching for a Mysterious Typeface Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying  Praise for the book:“The Little Database is an incredibly powerful intervention into twenty-first-century experimental poetics and avant-garde media practices.”—Stephanie Boluk“The Little Database opens new ground for close reading in an environment that heavily promotes big data techniques and the neoliberal ideologies that accompany it in the new economy of attention.”—Leonardo Reviews“Snelson targets the fundamental assumption underlying much of contemporary DH work: that meaningful interpretation necessarily depends on the deployment of massive amounts of data.”—Oxford's Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory“This book, while short in length, is certain to be long in influence, as it lays groundwork for future scholars, artists, readers, website makers, and archivists. The twists and turns, both in methodology and in specific analyses, are far more exciting than any summary, or even multiple readings of them, could serve.”—Digital Humanities QuarterlyThe Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats by Daniel Scott Snelson is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available at Manifold. 

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