Reading Lev Manovich

"Database As A Symbolic Form"

1. The Database Logic
From the historic view, the logic of a novel is narrative, expressive and subsequently arranged. Narrative could be considered as a traditional dominated human culture. Later, cinema brought us a similar form of expression of the modern age. In computer age, the new media objects do not tell stories, instead, they are collections of individual items, and organized in treelike structure.
Ervin Panofsky analyze linear perspective as a "symbolic form".

CD_ROM --- a storage media, as a "virtual museum", has narrative nature nature like museum.
HTML --- sequential, storage of separate elements, open nature (always can be edited), never be completed, less narrative.

2. Data and Algorithm
computer games: "While computer games do not follow database logic, they appear to be ruled by another logic - that of an algorithm. They demand that a player executes an algorithm in order to win."
"Algorithms and data structures have a symbiotic relationship. The more complex the data structure of a computer program, the simpler the algorithm needs to be, and vice versa. Together, data structures and algorithms are two halves of the ontology of the world according to a computer."

A program reads in data, executes an algorithm, and writes out new data.
Once it is digitized, the data has to be cleaned up, organized indexed. The computer age brought with it a new cultural algorithm: reality -> media -> data -> database.

3. Database and Narrative

In general, creating a work in new media can be understood as the construction of an interface to a database... Database becomes the center of the creative process in the computer age. Database narrative is interactive. (user >< database) An interactive narrative can then be understood as the sum of multiple trajectories through a database. Traditional linear narrative can be seen as a particular case of a hyper-narrative.

Conditions to be narrative: it should contain both an actor and a narrator; it also should contain three distinct levels consisting of the text, the story, and the fabula; and its "contents" should be "a series of connected events caused or experienced by actors."

In summary, database and narrative do not have the same status in computer culture. Database is an unmarked term. Database supports narrative, but not narrative.

4. The Semiotics of Database

keeping each element as separate layer -> allow to change anytime -> montage look -> impossibility in reality

semiological theory of syntagm and paradigm: the elements of a system can be related on two dimensions: syntagmatic and paradigmatic. As defined by Barthes, "the syntagm is a combination of signs, which has space as a support." (* this is the syntagmatic dimension, exist in the physical world.)
linear sequence
(In paradigm dimension:) each new element is chosen from a set of other related elements. This dimension is related in absentia.

For instance, in the case of a written sentence, the words which comprise it materially exist on a piece of paper, while the paradigmatic sets to which these words belong only exist in writer's and reader's minds.
In the case of fashion outfit, the elements which make it, such as a skirt, a jacket, are present in reality, while pieces of clothing which could have been present instead - different skirt, different blouse, different jacket - only exist in the viewer's imagination. Thus, syntagm is explicit and paradigm is implicit; one is real and the other is imagined.
Literary and cinematic narratives work in the same way.

New media reverses this relationship. Database(the paradigm) is given material existence, while narrative (the syntagm) is de-materialised. Pis privileged, S is downplayed. P is real, S is virtual.