The digitized afterlives of cultural objects.
I'm really interested in this double edged sword of access to digital materials. One hand, preserving privacy or rights of of artists. On the other hand, the kinds of creative use that that I know we all deploy, which also feels very different now in 2025 when those same materials are being absorbed and consumed by tech oligarchs to produce their endlessly growing and world destroying large language models.
Vicki Bennett:A lot of the friction that can happen in chains of information and cutting people off in chains, it's not really about the tools that are being used, it's about our agency in our actions with the tools that we use and the knowledge that we have.
Craig Dworkin:I never would have dreamed of language not equal. These are things I don't wanna pretend to predict. The absence of metadata, is one of the things I'm I'm also most proud of.
Luca Messarra:What your book does very well, Danny, is it excavates that past tradition of sharing that I think later generations weren't necessarily exposed to.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Hi, and welcome. I'm honored to be hosting this conversation with the University of Minnesota Press podcast today. My name is Danny Snelson. I'm an associate professor in the departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, where I also serve as faculty in the digital humanities program, the laboratory for environmental narrative strategies, and the UCLA game lab. In my research, teaching, and creative practices, I focus on unlikely constellations of poetry and poetics, experimental writing and art, material texts, network cultures, and emerging genres.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by three personal heroes gathered on the occasion of the publication of my book, The A Poetics of Media Formats, published by the University of Minnesota Press as the sixty fourth edition to the great electronic mediation series edited by N. Catherine Hales, Peter Krapp, Rita Raley, and Samuel Weber. The book is now available in print as an ebook and an open access edition hosted by the Manifold platform, which features the full book as well as a wide range of expanded digital materials that we'll discuss shortly. But first, I'm eager to introduce my interlocutors, Vicki Bennett, Craig Dworkin, and Luca Massara. From Craig's mentorship that reaches back to the earliest stages of my academic training, to Luca's inspiring work as my student at UCLA and beyond, to Vicky's multimedia practice as people like us, which I've admired from afar over the past twenty years.
Daniel Scott Snelson:I'm floored to be in conversation with these three inspirations today. The project is indebted to each of them more than the they likely know, and I'm simply excited to have the opportunity to learn more from each to enrich some of the themes and concepts from the book. I'll invite them to introduce themselves before giving some summary comments on the little database, which will then open up a conversation to put our various works and practices in relation to the book. So I think let's go alphabetical. Vicky, would you like to start us off?
Vicki Bennett:Yeah. I am Vicki Bennett and I work under the artist's name People Like Us. I've been working with editing and re editing, composing and decomposing pre existing material for my entire adult life, so thirty plus years. The work takes the form of movies, live performances, gigs, albums and more recently I've been partaking in a PhD, which is at age 55 I started it. So before that point I was not involved particularly in academia, so I kind of just jumped in the deep end there.
Vicki Bennett:Since then I've been writing about my practice rather than practising. But that said, a lot of my work has always been text based because it's process led. It involves working with mind maps and making transparent the way that I edit and bring things together.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Wonderful. So much more to say on all of that. But, Craig, can we turn things over to you?
Craig Dworkin:Yeah, Craig Dworkin. I'm at the University of Utah where Danny told me it was okay for me to come. I told Danny it was okay for him to stay at Princeton, and he told me it was okay to move to Salt Lake City, where I teach literary history and theory and the history of the avant garde. I'm really happy to be here.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Wonderful. It's great to see you, Craig, and hear you, I guess, since we're on a podcast. Now, Luca.
Luca Messarra:Hi. My name is Luca Messarra. I'm honored and thrilled to be in this company. I am a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University. I'm a digital humanist, a media and archival theorist, and a literary sociologist of around post 1960 US literary culture.
Luca Messarra:And more specifically, work right now and my dissertation is on the advent of print on demand and how that technology has changed the way we produce, experiment with, and receive these things called literary texts. I'm also a poet and a bookmaker who operates under the label of undocumented press. And if you look hard enough, you could probably find one of those books in your local research library.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Wonderful. Thank you, Luke. I know where ours is hidden at UCLA, but I'll keep that secret for now. I wanna thank everyone again for joining. Before launching into conversation, I suppose it will be helpful for the listener if I offer some summary comments on the Little Database project and why I'm excited to discuss it with my guests.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Generally, I think these summaries start with an origin narrative. For me, the Little Database has multiple entry points. As a document, it first cohered as a dissertation submitted for my doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in 2015, but it also contains works made as an editor for the sites I discuss in the book, including Pennsound, Ubooweb, Eclipse, and the Electronic Poetry Center, where I've worked on and off over the past twenty years. Or really, it could be said to have begun when I started scanning, yes, back at Princeton, scanning some magazines for Craig as a work study student in 2004. Since then, it's grown to include creative media poetics projects interfacing with emerging writing technologies like large language models and other ordinary media platforms in the present.
Daniel Scott Snelson:One of the things that I found fascinating about a long term research project like this one is just how much it's changed over the years. What began as an inquiry into what I saw as cutting edge media practices in the aughts has grown into a historical reflection on an earlier time in the Internet from two decades removed, where I'm now returning to what I think of as latent potentials in these residual digital repertoires that persist in the shadow of today's always on social media driven, hyper capitalized, and increasingly AI dominated digital networks. More succinctly, when I began the project, I was using the idea of Lidl to work against what was then called and now sounds quaint called big data. Today, I think the little more directly speaks to the largeness of large language models whose massive computation are transforming our relation to data more generally, and I should note most often for the worse. These efforts, these large data efforts stake their hopes for meaningful interpretation on the parsing of enormous amounts of information.
Daniel Scott Snelson:In the humanities, the state, and the public sector alike, this logic is consistent with pervasive data valence, fintech, and medtech predictive technologies, and global systems of neoliberal or techno feudal informatic control. There's much more to say, of course, on all these developments, but for now, I'll just say that the project is directly responding to these currents by turning to the little database as an alternative and integral model for understanding our place in a rapidly changing information environment. More intimately, it aims to make sense of the idiosyncratic collections of everyday digital objects that we all carry around every day. You can think of, like, a a few 100 PDF files on your desktop, a thousand neglected photo captures on your phone, an old collection of m p three or movie files on a hard drive somewhere gathering the digital equivalent of dust. These ordinary collections are at once far too large to read in traditional sense as anyone attempting to make sense of their own desktop file hierarchies can tell you, while also remaining significantly below the threshold for significant computational analysis.
Daniel Scott Snelson:But more on that shortly. If one half of the project is to use the little as a way to resist trends and massive computation and analytics, analytic currents in the digital humanities, the other half deploys the little in relationship to the little magazine. Like the little magazines of the historical avant gardes, the little databases that I examine in the book offer what I consider a dynamic forum for investigating a global situation of politics, aesthetics, meaning in a time of pervasive technological change. The methodological challenges faced by periodical studies where full runs can number hundreds of issues containing thousands of individual works as well as ads, circulation histories, and a range of material, text, contexts. All of these things mirror the sites I examine.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Importing the study of of these sites into the context of the Little Magazine offers a kind of backdoor entry into a longer history of textual studies and editorial theory. This is a way for me to approach the forensic materiality that textual scholars have introduced to born digital objects or the infrastructural turn in media studies. I call the operant methodology of my project contingent reading, which is built out of the contingent methods described by Alan Liu as a kind of postmodern historicist hermeneutic zigzag that relational databases demand. I've recently published on this framework in relationship to the speculative video game Death Stranding as a way to think about the fetch quest alongside ordinary search queries. In the LITTLE database, I contend that every interpretive act is a kind of fetch quest attempting to make sense of a shifting terrain that's subject to unpredictable and conditional situations.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Finally, one note on media poetics, then I'll stop. Instead of, an academic paper, that simply addresses the media as a kind of external object, I'm interested in how we might imagine creative media practices as performing scholarship in their own right. This follows a trend in the digital humanities toward building or constructing knowledge as a kind of scholarly practice. Jerome McGahn and Lisa Samuels perhaps best encapsulate this approach with their term deformance, which they define as an academic performance working within the materials that it studies to surface unseen aspects of the work, a kind of critical remix practice or scholarly making. So beyond the chapters proper, I should note that the book, the Little Database, also includes a Python generated work of remix, a fraudulent generative magazine bootleg, an audio essay, a database movie, and an indexical experiment with generative writing.
Daniel Scott Snelson:So in this way, the Little database attempts to offer both creative tactics and contingent reading methods for making meaning within these collections, drawn from the print history of the Little magazine, the unlikely afterlives of media specific works of art and letters, and a range of media poetics for the transformative production of knowledge. Throughout, I argue or attempt to argue the online versions of works in these collections are not only transformed at every point of access, but that these versions, these digital versions circulating online transform our understanding of each historical work in turn. Okay. That's more than enough for me to get started. I was thinking it might be great to start our conversation with a concrete example drawn from the where the book ends with Vicki Bennett, aka People Like Us, whose phenomenal compilation movie, We Edit Life, has been an inspiration to me for years, and to my students, I should add.
Daniel Scott Snelson:So Vicki, I was wondering if you can just tell us a little bit about that work and its origins within the Prelinger collection and the Internet Archive.
Vicki Bennett:Okay, well, it's a celebration of the Internet, but beyond that, it's a celebration of being able to network with people near and far, beyond the local basically. One big part of it is that it occurred at the beginning of high speed computing and high speed internet and also the beginning of file sharing. So that would be things like Napster, where you could go and discover what's in other people's folders in their computers, which is a massive thing in terms of reaching out beyond the local and the mundane of the local. But also as soon as I got broadband I knew that there was this thing called archive.org and I'd heard that someone had been persuaded to put a bunch of films up there. And before that point I'd been working for ten years with audio and a little with video, but generally kind of analog scratch video.
Vicki Bennett:And so it was just amazing to find this archive, the Prelinga archives. And I immediately emailed Rick and he replied straight away, you know, a friendship started. It's a celebration of that as well, of not just the archive, which can mean all sorts of things, but the archivist, the person who helps you navigate the archive. And then I'm helping people navigate the archive as well. And so it's a kind of a self conscious journey through that experience.
Vicki Bennett:And so it is a performative thing where I'm acting out the fact that I'm an editor. So we edit life. I'm editing my life in that relationship with that media with great joy and also great joy that I was finally able to use tools that I've been dreaming of my whole life. Adobe After Effects for drawing around things and Pro Tools Free. And the fact that Pro Tools was available once for free is very hard to imagine now.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Yeah, I sketched some of that the way that the affordances of not just the the nascent Internet archive, but the Pro Tools and and these, like, the democratization, I guess, of filmmaking practices that that film deploys. But I love this personal angle to We Edit Life. On one hand, that's one of the things I've been trying to do is how do you connect these public presentations or public collections like the Internet Archive to these private collections of of things that we have on our our desktops. One of the things I I I found really fascinating, I'm not sure if it made it in the book, was was how much of the Internet archive was actually generated by your calls. Like, he was actively digitizing these films and you were pulling from a catalog.
Daniel Scott Snelson:And so the the production of this film also produced the Internet archive in some ways. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Vicki Bennett:Yeah, so it was a commission by LoveBytes, who were a media organisation, arts media, in the North Of England. So I had a little bit of money to give Rick. He was just doing it for me anyway. They gave me some money to digitise stuff with Rick. Rick would give me bits of his database which he had in a document that you what was the name of something?
Vicki Bennett:Edit. Anyway, you'll remember the name of the document in a minute. And he had all his text database and then I could word search it. And then I would, because I couldn't preview it, because I was in London and him in San Francisco, I'd say, well, what's that one like? And then he would verbally explain it to me.
Vicki Bennett:And then I'd go, oh yeah, that's what I need. And then he gradually got to understand what I liked. And then he'd start suggesting it. And then he'd digitize it. And then if it wasn't in the archive, he'd add it to the archive.
Daniel Scott Snelson:That's amazing. And I think it's that search practice that I also found really inspiring about the work that, you know, so much of the history of studying found footage films is about this, like, metacinematic critique, or you have these clips that are from some, like, impossibly obscure sources, and you'll never find them. So it's it's not worth even thinking about where the samples actually come from. I feel like that film that you made also was one of the first times where I could search for every one of the clips. And I could watch your film, but also use your films a kind of index or or access point to a whole range of, like, unlikely industrial films, family home videos, and so on.
Daniel Scott Snelson:It's one thing that I've wanted to know more is is how you relate to the samples you use. I know you're you're researching sampling techniques now. There's always, a musical quality and a sense of, like, playfulness in the work you make. I'm curious how you think about how it interfaces with these various historical dimensions ranging from We Edit Life all the way to the new work you're doing with Library of Babel. There's a notable clip where you're you're working with Barbie, for example, and and kind of animating these these characters bringing Barbie in conversation with sci fi films from the fifties and a really rich array of some very recognizable sources and some that are quite obscure.
Daniel Scott Snelson:And I'm curious about how you think about the history of the source material you use.
Vicki Bennett:Well, when I was doing that, what was it, twenty four, twenty three years ago, I didn't think about it in the way that I am now because I hadn't educated myself to it. And I think you said in your book that you were educated partly through searching these archives. That's how I got educated too. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't have any kind of idea or critique what I was doing.
Vicki Bennett:I was just doing it. In the same way as many years earlier, I didn't know about plunderphonics. I was just using samples and someone told me. And so there wasn't any kind of explanation for why I was doing it. Then I just pieced it together.
Vicki Bennett:Actually, when you wrote about it, I understood it way more than I understood it. You understood it way more. And it's quite funny to pick up on what you said then, because I'm reading about all those people now. Now I'm doing my PhD all these years later, which just goes to show linearity work in various directions. What was the question again?
Daniel Scott Snelson:Oh, that was great. That was great. No, and I think that the linearity there, I wanted to connect maybe with some of what Luca's been doing. So much of my education came from these collections and and from the archives, like Internet Archive or or Uber Web or Eclipse. You know, having been there as those things were emerging was was one type of experiment or or one type of experience where I'm I'm interested, Luca, in in how you relate to the you've been doing a lot of research with the Internet Archive today, which is less this kind of like open space that's building something brand new and and rather a kind of precarious collection that's subject to to erasure, what you call vanishing culture or fragile records.
Daniel Scott Snelson:And I wonder if we can maybe like bridge some of these like origins that that that, you know, Vicky helping to generate the the online prelinger collection to the type of preservation and advocacy work that you've been doing?
Luca Messarra:Yeah, I think that there's a lot of false public sentiment around something like the Internet Archive or on little databases in general that thinks of them as like these harbingers of piracy that are intentionally just trying to steal from artists and to not give them their money's worth. But I think Vicky's example here is great insofar as it points to remix culture, something that's very respectful of the original source material and that utilizes it in innovative and creative ways. And it's something that is endangered, disappearing as a result of a change in media distribution that I talked about in this report that I just published last year with the internet archive called Vanishing Culture. In particular, that report was focusing on a transition from file ownership of, say, the early 2000s and the '90s and media ownership more broadly to something like streaming and licensing. And as a result of which people aren't as able to do this sort of remixing of culture if they're not able to actually access the files themselves.
Luca Messarra:Of course, if you're like a very tech savvy person, there's ways in which you could access these files, but by and large, the transition sort of inhibits the public's ability to play this kind of critical role in participating in an archival tradition and participating in a remixed tradition.
Daniel Scott Snelson:So the vanishing culture report, I would just love to hear you talk a little bit more about that. And I am really interested in this kind of double edged sword of access to digital materials. On one hand, preserving privacy or rights of artists. On the other hand, the kinds of creative use that I know we all deploy, which also feels very different now in 2025, when those same materials are being absorbed and consumed by these like tech oligarchs to produce their endlessly growing and world destroying large language models. So I'm interested, guess, I know this is something you think about a lot, Luca, is that the politics of use and the politics of, in particular, the use of these kinds of digital objects.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Would love to hear you maybe parse some of how you're thinking about access, piracy, things like shadow libraries, but also permission based archives in the present.
Luca Messarra:Thank you, Danny. So we had a lot of conversations when we were drafting the Vanishing Culture Report around this exact question of when is it bad for there to be maximum access to materials? In particular, this comes up with questions such as sacred knowledge and religious knowledge that might not circulate or should not circulate more broadly. And so one of the purposes of the report was to kind of critique against premature loss of digital materials that have been caused as a result of these transitions into something like streaming or licensing, or as a result of extended copyright laws, which have been lobbied for by big corporations like Disney, which make it such that publications that are thirty, forty, 50 years old are essentially impossible to access unless you actually go to a research library. And so there's a politics of access there where what I'm interested in is a broader public access to materials.
Luca Messarra:So long as that access is like, accept like the way the way I define sort of a cultural publication is just something that's intentionally disseminated and distributed to a wider audience. And so I wouldn't want something that isn't intentionally desired to be out there to continue to be out there against people's wishes. But I do think that if somebody intentionally puts something out there, and they're okay with it being out there, then it should circulate. I was definitely seduced by that information desires to be free thing at a young age, as somebody who sort of came of age with the early internet. I remember being exposed to quarantine when I was 10 and having no idea what exactly it was, but just being sort of in awe of the fact that like somebody could access all these materials online however they desired.
Luca Messarra:I hold on to that sort of utopian vision. And I think what your book does very well, Dani, is it excavates that past tradition of sharing that I think later generations weren't necessarily exposed to, and who have inherited an internet that's fundamentally different than the internet of the late twentieth century and early twenty first century.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Yeah. And I'm almost shocked that you even you were torrenting at all. I think, you know, increasingly with my students, they've had no encounter with that. And of course, Luca's made, I'll just plug, an amazing book called Seed that works with the artistry of various kinds of hackers and whereas demo scene producers in ASCII format with torrent distribution. But all those repertoires are disappearing, like, you know, downloading has moved towards streaming.
Daniel Scott Snelson:And the kind of repertoires that I developed, I think mostly with Craig, and I wanted to maybe turn to you, thinking about just how different it was to to be scanning and producing these kinds of materials when it felt really vital, I guess, in in the year 2000 to surface a rare small press poetry books and and magazines that would be impossible to access otherwise. It feels really different now when everything is there, like it seems like everything is there or, you know, to be like an a kind of like amateur archivist who's scanning things in independently feels very different now that, you know, every library has digitization officers and JSTOR is releasing these massive collections of rare magazines somewhat regularly. I'm interested in, you know, I think just across the board, Craig and also Vicki, how you're thinking about your relationship to these kinds of collections now versus how you maybe were thinking about them as they emerged in the twenty aughts.
Craig Dworkin:I'm always amused by the fact that Eclipse and Google started in the same year. I always remember this because it startled me so much. This is back when telephones used to be attached to the walls of buildings. And I had a telephone in my office, in the basement office at Princeton, that I didn't even know the number to. Never gave it to anyone because I didn't want anyone to contact me.
Craig Dworkin:But it rang one day. It scared the shit out of me. It was really loud. And it was Larry Page who I'd never heard of, and he had this company I'd never heard of. But he and he had this plan to scan so many books, it would be as deep as the ocean.
Craig Dworkin:We would swim in an ocean of books. He said, he gave me like this this two minute elevator pitch. And then he said, you know, could Google use the eclipse titles to start their their collection of books? And, you know, there there were maybe 20 of them. This speaks to the little part of this at a point where 20 books look like, wow, we could get a head start here.
Craig Dworkin:The point being that obviously they were prescient. They named it Google. I could have named Eclipse score. Like maybe we will someday have four score books on there. And they obviously increased exponentially and geometrically.
Craig Dworkin:While you maybe even know how many books are on Eclipse now, we've grown incrementally, arithmetically. And I think the one thing that feels different to me now about the project is what a collection means when the rest of the internet is so much larger just by these orders of magnitudes of data, and increasingly commercialized, which is to also say increasingly homogeneous. Somehow there's much more, at least at a kind of infrastructure level. Whatever interesting things people are doing doesn't mean that there aren't these interesting things. But they're all on WordPress or they used to all be on Tumblr a decade ago or whatever.
Craig Dworkin:And I I I think that that makes something like Eclipse feel much more eccentric than it used to be. I think there's questions about poetry culture that we could we could throw in there as as well that that that highlight the same eccentricity. Does that make sense?
Daniel Scott Snelson:Absolutely. And I I love this. There's two things that makes me think of. One, I I love the, I didn't know this history about Larry Page and the the 20 books of Eclipse potentially being at the origin of of Google Books and and their massive accumulation of literature. It it does remind me of what what really inspired the interlude to chapter two, which is a a kind of fraudulent bootleg of language magazine, which I know is the most accessed magazine in the collection.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Very, very important document that Craig has worked on quite a bit, infamously under read document in literary history. I discovered at a certain point, the Allen Institute for AI had done this research around what websites large language models had absorbed. And I discovered that they had absorbed on the other side of Google Books starting alongside Eclipse, that all of Eclipse had somehow been absorbed by these large language models that do produce this kind of plain Internet vernacular in general. But somewhere in like the dark heart, say of Chatzi BT, the entirety of the Eclipse archive is there. Like, it knows language poetry.
Daniel Scott Snelson:It knows these like experimental approaches to the politics of language. And so in that work, I'm trying to resurface that in some ways and put that back in dialogue with some of the original print materials. The other half of what I found really interesting, what you were just talking about, Craig, is just how exciting the the hand coded Internet is becoming for for young artists and writers. I've been interested in this, what what people are calling the web revivalism. Young artists are are using things like neo cities to produce these, outlandish, hand coded websites as a kind of rejection of the filter bubbles that I think, you know, most of these young artists have have grown up entirely within their entire lives.
Daniel Scott Snelson:What might have been like an intuitive practice or a a matter of necessity in hand coding the HTML of Eclipse, which has remained really quite constant, has somehow transformed over the course of a quarter century into maybe a really exciting potential for new forms of creative practice on the Internet. It's like a return like, I don't know, as a kind of like retro process, but also like returning as maybe a kind of digital practice that has resistance built into it or has more control in a digital space, which is swiftly decimating what was once known as say, like the the commons or the digital commons to become a hypergated, hyper controlled space.
Craig Dworkin:Ken, I wanna say one one thing about it, and then I wanna ask you about it because it strikes me as being, you know, really perverse to hand type these plain text files. Feels like we mentioned the Xerox machine, but it feels more like I don't even know what they use crystal set ham radio operators or something like that. There's really no good reason to do it, I think. The thing I wanna point out that I do like about it is every time I I log on to the Bluehost down in Orem, I have to click through pop up ads about whether we're gonna optimize Eclipse in in search engines and and how I'm gonna drive commercial traffic to this completely noncommercial site. And what I like is the there's basically no metadata at all because, and this goes back to something, you know, Luca was saying that I don't wanna imagine what people will do with that material, when I make it available.
Craig Dworkin:I never would have dreamed of language not equal. These are things I don't wanna pretend to predict. And so the absence of metadata is one the things I'm I'm also most proud of on this site. But I wanted to ask you what some of the latent potentials you see in the obsolescence, because I'd love for it to be something other than just perversity and ineptitude.
Daniel Scott Snelson:I love the almost the occult practice of handwriting HTML files. Yeah. I think that there's a number of things that are latent or the latent potential. And I like this rejection of metadata. You know, one of, I think, the most sad developments in digital humanities is think about all of the hours people spend doing, like, textual encoding, like the TEI initiative, and these sort of, like, hours and hours of, like, producing the metadata to make a rich text that imagine somebody's going to use it.
Daniel Scott Snelson:And I don't know how many humans actually use TEI, but it it certainly helps train large language models, and and it certainly helps make some people billions of dollars. And I think it's, like, within that space, like, in in relationship to the current landscape of the internet, which is driven by these like five major companies, that the idea, like the very empowering idea that one can actually just write a web page by hand, it's almost shocking, I think, my students. Like, they they don't know that that's even, like, a possibility. And once they realize, well, it's really not that hard. Like, it's, you know, a CSS tag is is really like you can make the background change its color or you can drop a GIF in.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Maybe more more troubling in the other side of that is my students are also, like, producing these NeoCities websites by vibe coding. So they're prompting large language models to try to write things that look like they were handmade in the nineties. And I I think it's like those, like, historical disconnections or it's like putting those things in relationship to each other that has a kind of charge. I think when writing the little database, was really returning to these things that were produced in the aughts or the late 90s and finding all kinds of ways that they just offer different models or different imaginaries to what the internet could have become, what it might still be, different modes of empowerment for users to produce things or make things out of these materials. When you're just streaming movies, for example, you're not able to cut them together and and key them up in the way that Vicky does so brilliantly.
Daniel Scott Snelson:And and so I think, like, Eclipse is also something that can be downloaded, moved around, and then used in any number of ways that the user might want to, from being able to read it on the device they like to being able to remix it to produce something entirely new.
Luca Messarra:I just want to add in because you mentioned the vibe coding of these sort of old school websites. I'll age myself a little. I had an old school HTML website back in the day. And what I appreciated about it is I was aware who I was stealing my HTML from when I was trying to learn how to do it. And there was sort of a politics of like, oh, yeah, at least for me, should recognize who it is I was taking my HTML and my CSS from.
Luca Messarra:And that's something that's kind of masked by the LLM, right, when you're kind of vibe coding and you're just trying to generate this old school looking website. You miss this kind of like, I guess we could call it an infra thin care politics of like, oh, we should probably recognize the people we were taking from in the first place. And then more tangentially, I think obsolescence to me at least promotes opportunities for nostalgia and mourning. And Danny, what I kind of want to ask you is like, is the Little Database as a project a kind of nostalgic and mourning project in itself?
Daniel Scott Snelson:Oh, that's really nice. In some ways, yeah, I think, you know, mourning the practices where one had, say, more sense of agency or where the internet held this kind of sense of promise. My colleague Chris Kelty writes about being a historian of the internet that could have been. And I think, you know, in looking back to these models, that Internet that could have been remains a virtual possibility for other forms of connection in the future, forms of networking or connection or creative production that are more agential, that are able to work with real context and real histories. I think that erasure of context that large language models invoke is one of the most troubling aspects.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Right? So there's famous AI piece, this person does not exist, where every time you load a page in the browser, you get another face that, like, quote, unquote, doesn't exist. And and that that made a lot of headlines when it was released. But, of course, all those faces really do exist. It turned out that really it was just sort of like slightly tweaked, actual photos of people, that that really do exist.
Daniel Scott Snelson:It's just that their their history and their their context have been removed. And and so when I when I look at whether it's the magazines that are hosted by Eclipse, on one hand, you have the bibliographic data there, Craig, so I can go back and I know where these materials emerge from. I can learn about the the material history of these documents. But I can also, and this is the argument I'm trying to make in the book, think about the context of, like, language magazine as it lives on Eclipse. And that's one of the things I was really trying to do is to, like, take those digital objects and those experiences seriously so that they're not just some kind of indexical relationship to, say, like, a film that that might have screened at some point on celluloid, and I just happened to be having this degraded experience in, a shitty flash video file.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Instead, I was trying to think as somebody who grew up in rural Utah and and accessed avant garde materials mostly through my browser, I had very meaningful experiences seeing, you know, as as distorted as it was, seeing Stan Brakage on YouTube. And and I wanted to think, can I take that Stan Brakage film on YouTube seriously and and think about its context? And and and so I think it's an additive process throughout that that that these these files carry their histories, but their their meaning or our way of understanding them has layers of history and context that can be parsed and traced and searched and found. And this is really, you know, to go back to where we began with We Edit Life. One of the things I found so fascinating about that is I could like access both like the historical, the distant historical production of these works and their circulation on the internet in a specific moment.
Daniel Scott Snelson:So it was context additive rather than context subtractive.
Vicki Bennett:Yeah, I think context, as you've said, changes all the time and there's never one context, it's always relational. And I think a lot of what we talk about is the way that things are relational and how they can stand next to each other. They can overlap in the, you know, like an imprithin. But also what you're saying about authenticity. Authenticity is a weird one because we can often assume that authenticity starts with our knowledge of it or someone else's knowledge of it.
Vicki Bennett:Whereas you know something from two hundred years ago, they weren't having those problems then. Suppose you've got a public house and you try and make it look like an older public house, I mean like a pub. Supposing you make a bar look like a diner. Someone goes in there and they go in there and they have the authentic experience in the diner and then they find out it wasn't a diner, it was something else. What bit is authentic and what isn't?
Vicki Bennett:Who's lying? And so what I'm saying is, even with the LLMs, it's not really what you're doing, it's what's your intentions? Is it a knowing intention or that you just don't know which is okay as well? Not knowing, we've all done the not knowing, we don't know most things. We only know what we know.
Vicki Bennett:So what I'm saying is a lot of the friction that can happen in us talking about chains of information and cutting people off in chains, it's not really about the tools that are being used. It's about our agency in our actions with the tools that we use and the knowledge that we have.
Craig Dworkin:Can I tie something together that Viktor was saying about knowing and not knowing and that Luca was saying, and that I think speaks to a kind of social prehistory of the technologies that led to eclipse and a dynamic that you'll have something smarter to say about? But I just wanna note the dynamic that I'm think because I'm still thinking about the Xerox machine, which technologically does one thing. But the social and political life of the Xerox machine in the late '80s and the early '90s, which was part of sharing with people that you knew, or I think of we used to have Kinko copy shops. And in Berkeley, I went to grad school, had Krishna Copy, which before they got hit with a huge copyright infringement lawsuit, which just would, for a few dollars would copy entire books for you in the afternoon. But you did that to share with your reading group, or you did that to make pamphlets that you would hand out at a you'd exchange with people at poetry reading, or you were in seminar and you wanted to share an article with people.
Craig Dworkin:And now I feel like there's lots of sharing, but it's indexical. You say, have you seen this streaming here? And that obviously and this is the obvious part that maybe you can say more about that I knew those people. And part of what's great and not great about the online archive is I don't know who. I all the people, like, I don't want to imagine what they're going to do with this material.
Craig Dworkin:I also don't know who they are to begin with. And I wonder if that dynamic is something that animates these databases for you in some way.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Yeah. That's a really rich set of things. I wanna pick up on on both of these. I was thinking about the not just, say, maybe not authenticity or or agency, but experience. Like the the question of, like, and the performance of of cultural encounter with, you know, say a diner, like a pub that's dressed up like a diner so you have a diner experience.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Was reminded of this great anecdote that Bruce Sterling used to tell when defining the atemporal, what he called the atemporality, which is he was he was this was like early Internet right after, say, you could order anything you wanted on Amazon. But if you wanted to live as an astronaut, it'd be really easy to just, buy up things on eBay and and produce an astronaut station in your home, like eat dried food, and like walk around in a space suit. And you could like experience the life of an astronaut from home. And he found this to be like a really interesting like interruption to like historical time, and that was like actually like produced by the Internet. And I think that that that kind of, like, temporal dislocation, Craig, has a lot to do with experience, encounter, and and connection with these digital materials.
Daniel Scott Snelson:For me, you know, I have some very cherished dot m p four files that I keep kind of close at hand that are more valuable to me, say, than than a VHS cassette tape or of like a video art piece. In the same way that, you know, my printed version that I made when I was an undergrad, where I just printed out those, the entirety of language magazine, and I annotated it, you know, by hand. It was just on like, shitty eight and a half by 11 paper that's all, like, crumpled, and it has all this age. Like, that's to me the most valuable edition of language magazine that that that I know about. And and so I think that there is something interesting to to pick up on both of these these threads and and trying to, like, take digital experiences seriously, and and two, to to think about them within these social contexts.
Daniel Scott Snelson:So those are also the links that I send to people or sharing a file is very different than the indexical reference, like have you seen X streaming on Y, as opposed to what I like to do in my grad seminars, for example. Here's a zip file with 300 books that we're going to study. And and, like, you know, what kind of strategies can we all develop together to unpack these 300 books together? And I think it's it's you know, so it's always in that kind of, like, connection or in the the social space in which culture lives that I think that meaning is most potently felt. Even these things that feel kind of like anonymous, like non social media objects, like Eclipse that are SEO resistance, that are hand coded, that aren't trying to optimize for shares on social media, they still have rich social lives, and they have profound effects, I think, on one, how we encounter these historical objects, but how, you know, increasingly, my students are going to encounter these objects.
Daniel Scott Snelson:They've been not going to be able to access most of these materials in person. We all know how rare it is to see I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, Vicky. How rare it is to see celluloid in person. And, you know, how do you teach, like, the history of, structural film when you can't actually see the celluloid? And and does that just mean that my students will never have a meaningful experience of those films?
Daniel Scott Snelson:Or or are there ways in which those meaningful experiences can be articulated otherwise? I'm not sure if that was a question, Vicky, but I'd love to hear but you do so much with mediation in your work. It's one of the things I love is you have all these really smart ways up to in Library of Babel where you process these historical film characters where they look like they're walking in and out of these digitized pixels, where you bring these, like, really wild different points in history together, but you keep a lot of the noise. You keep the static and the hiss and the, the scratches in the celluloid in your films. And I guess I'd love to hear your thoughts on like, yeah, how do you think about playing, I guess, media history in that way?
Vicki Bennett:I think actually, I like other people to play it out for me. So what I do is I show the connections between things. So if someone said, what is the main thing you're trying to do?' is I want to show that everything's connected, everything's relational, that there's no duality and connection, that we can create a duality. And what people experience might be something else. So you will have a lot of people being indexical going, oh, what's that movie?
Vicki Bennett:What's that movie? Did you see that movie? Oh, who's that actor?' actor? But my aim is to move beyond that with something that I'd call the overwhelm'. So I use all those things in the same way that if you meditate to start with your mind's going and then it gets to a point it goes, no.
Vicki Bennett:Like that overwhelm, no. And it might be overwhelmed, no. And that's what I want people to experience is this sort of sublime feeling of the overwhelm where they give up and surrender from their chattering mind into an experience that is a deeper experience of a lot. And I also think I don't know if this is answering your question, but I did unmute so I was going to say something. So it probably is this: we are always overwhelmed with information and we've got our own filters that actually have to focus us.
Vicki Bennett:Because I mean, for instance, everything around us in the room could get to us. You know, like my cat keeps meowing behind me. That could drive me insane right now. And the same goes when I was making three sixty movies, which I still do, where the audience sit in the middle. You're dealing with the fact that you're making movies that only 180% of it can be seen.
Vicki Bennett:And then I was thinking, well, how do you deal with that? How do other people deal with that? How does the indexical deal? You overwhelm them. That's what you do.
Vicki Bennett:You actually throw the whole lot at them and then let them sort it out. So actually I'm not sorting anything out for anyone. I'm just laying it there and I'm finding as much of it as I can, putting it all together, showing how they can navigate all through these doorways and through the pixels and make it into a psychedelic experience of moving through all these narratives, all these different actors in actor world, a bit like Christian Marclay's the Clock'. I feel that you enter into the world of narrative, the world of actors where they are all the time, and then he's made an edit of their world. And I like to think of it in this kind of fantastical, magical way.
Vicki Bennett:Certainly not any kind of mourning of anything, although I understand hauntology, the purpose of all that kind of thing. But what I'm saying is I just want to present a really, really eloquent picture of the fact that everything is connected and also that everything is a copy but not in a hierarchical way. So in a non linear, non temporal way or temporal way, there's no copy, there's just another one. That's what I'm trying to change the language of the way we think, that we don't have to count things. And I make massive lists.
Vicki Bennett:I make massive lists. Do it as well.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Yeah, I like that they're all copies. But also, all the copies are originals, I guess, in Boris Groys' sense that each of those copies then becomes a new original. I wanted to pick up on this, you know, both this idea that you're saying like the rhythm, right, where you bring something up and then you get overwhelmed. So like having like a rhythm to those productions, but also being able to produce the kind of affective feeling of being overwhelmed, which I I certainly get in your work, especially as, like, say certain sounds start mounting and and crescendoing, and and you have this amazing way of playing with rhythm. I don't know.
Daniel Scott Snelson:I don't think I've ever been overwhelmed by, say, an academic essay. Like, that there's something you can do in those movies that that, like, an essay just can't do. And Craig taught me to to, like, actually sit and and read things that that seem unreadable. And and, like, having an experience of, say, Craig trying to read your parse, and I spent a long time reading parse, would be is profound you know, profoundly different than any essay about parse could produce. It produces a different kind of affect, a different kind of experience, and builds a certain a different kind of, like, knowledge for me.
Daniel Scott Snelson:And I know I'm I'm gonna connect all three of us here, all three of you here, Luca with undocumented press, that as a kind of performative activist poetics, you're able to do things with that press that that you you couldn't do in in, say, white papers or or forms of scholarship. So I thought maybe, you know, as we get toward the end of our recording session, we can start having some kind of open conversations around some core questions that I've been thinking about and would love to hear you say more about. I am obsessed with this idea of creative scholarship. Bring it forward in my classes. I'm very interested and mostly just because the normative forms of academe are so pervasive that anything that escapes them is really exciting for me, I feel like I'm always hunting them.
Daniel Scott Snelson:And and I know all three of you think quite a bit about forms of of creative scholarship or or or poetics. And and I'd I'd love to hear, yeah, your your thoughts on on how maybe you see your practices reflected or or or not in the work that I'm trying to do with the LITTLE database?
Vicki Bennett:I'd just like to say that what I said about duality is that sometimes you get the person explaining and then everyone else has got to listen. And that's where the performative aspect is really helpful, because you take the audience come with you. And so if you're making a text or audio visual piece, If they're present in the process, it's no longer a closed end product because there is no beginning and ending really. These ideas that things have to have an introduction and an ending and index and I'd love to hear you talk about the index index later. I think it's important to find these ways of performing within your medium.
Vicki Bennett:Since starting my PhD, I had no idea that my PhD was going to be performative, but it could not be. I had to make it this really, really long text that I started making where I was actually giving examples of what I was talking about within it and then making it more like a kind of rhizomatic diary. And I didn't know I was going to be doing that, but I had to because it's so tedious doing it any other way. Full stop.
Daniel Scott Snelson:It's a great stop. I'll pick up on the index index really quickly. It was the last piece of this book and I think it really only came out with the Manifold Edition. I became really obsessed with the index as a format. It's like the last thing you have to do with an academic book, because you have to go back to the pages and try to figure out what are the good key terms, what are the kind of subject clusters that someone might use.
Daniel Scott Snelson:But it's such an anachronistic form. Like, you know, it's very good, I guess, for the codex. But I imagine most people will encounter this book digitally and ideally in some kind of rogue archive or shadow library somewhere where they can search for the terms that they might be looking for. So I got into this deep history around the index and how it was formulated and realized that it's one of these things that always comes after that books come first and the index has to follow a book. Was like, oh, but I I wonder and I think increasingly generative AI, that that relationship is exactly flipped on its head, right, where large language models are these massive index indexes that generate books.
Daniel Scott Snelson:So the index is writing the kind of outputs that we all encounter. And so I was trying to come up with a form that would be able to express that. And again, it's one of those things where I felt like it could only be performed. So what would it look like in material practice for an index to generate a book that precedes it. And so I compiled 16 indexes into this massive index and then generated term accurate pages using a range of large language models to write book that would be accurate to an index.
Daniel Scott Snelson:And, you know, the experiment is whatever, right? Like, I think you're saying, like, you know, it can land or not with audiences. I think you could do a lot of different things with it. I haven't even read the entire thing myself. But, you know, I think it's able to I think it opens a kind of dimension or advantage, I guess, on indexicality in the present that I would find really impossible to articulate otherwise.
Vicki Bennett:I think it's brilliant. Really, it's just wonderful. I got really excited when I saw that because I love the idea of turning around, know, all the hierarchies of beginnings and ends and where is exactly that we think we started with this thing. If you have a, you know, the Codex book, know, you've got to have a certain amount of pages and size and all of that thing. And at the same time, you don't want this vast kind of labyrinth.
Vicki Bennett:What I love about that is the idea that it's a recipe and it's prescriptive, you know, and you get to make what you want, but you don't know what it's going to be if someone else finds out for you because they found out already. But that's what a book is anyway.
Luca Messarra:I want to pick up on the creative scholarship thing. So I'll begin by giving a brief outline of what undocumented press is and why I find your book really helpful for me right now, particularly as I'm going on the job market and trying to think about ways of professionalizing myself and describing the work that I do and feeling like a kind of a sellout in doing so. But I think the little database helps me for thinking of things in not so much sellout terms, but as like different media instantiations of these objects having specific meanings depending upon the database that they're in. So I started undocumented press as a project in a class of Danny for electronic poetry. And in particular, it was founded to publish one book in particular, which was called Poetry of America.
Luca Messarra:And what I did is I took this horribly racist anthology of American poetry from the nineteenth century by William Linton. And then I ran it through I took a PDF of it from Google Books. And I ran that PDF through a website that was gonna translate it using Google Translate in the languages of the colonial domination of the new world. So English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and then back into English. And so it kicked up a lot of linguistic noise.
Luca Messarra:It became this weird multilingual document, as well as this like kind of glitchy strange document as a result of the PDF and codings. And then I republished it as a print on demand book with Lulu that looks like the hardcover copy that's at Young Research Library at UCLA. And because I was working at the library at the time, I had access to call number slips and magnetic strips. And so I fixed a call number to it and I fixed a magnetic strip to it and I shelved it at the research library at UCLA. And at the time I didn't necessarily think of it in terms of creative scholarship, I just thought of it as like a synthesis of everything that I'd been doing at the time, A sort of way to escape like the board monotonies of like my work study job too, which is an interesting thing to think about.
Luca Messarra:The like sort of intersections between like making something playful out of the labor that you're kind of required to do in order to pay rent. Since then I've sort of like published and distributed these books. And Dani I remember when I first did it you were like, make sure you're documenting it. And I was like, well I don't understand the point in documenting it, why would I document it? And now that I'm on the job market I'm like, oh man, should really document these things.
Luca Messarra:But this is all to say that the little database helps me because like I've been thinking about the terms that I use to kind of describe the work and the irony of like documenting an undocumented press as like a fugitive press that shouldn't really be documented in the first place. And the point that I'm kind of getting at is that like the work has different meanings when it's on a CV, when you encounter it randomly in a library, or like when you encounter it as a PDF that's hosted to the internet archive. And thinking specifically about those little databases helps me to be a little bit less anxious about like me quote unquote selling out by like uploading this, like attaching it to my CV and saying this is like a work of creative scholarship versus this is a work of activist literature.
Daniel Scott Snelson:I mean, absolutely I I also write about this book. It it really is just such an inspiring project. And I'm really, you know, one, I'm honored and and delighted to hear that. The big purpose of of trying to produce this book is I've been interested in these weird forms of making. And I, you know, I was lucky enough to have mentors in my graduate study and, you know, perverse librarians like Craig to encourage me from, you know, the earliest point in my academic study to explore these these other modes and and experimental ways of making.
Daniel Scott Snelson:That that I really wanted the book really dedicated to, you know, my students and and potential future students that might feel enabled and empowered to to make make academe stranger and and and produce these kinds of things and and find new forms of value. Of course, in the digital humanities, we're we're still thinking quite a bit about how to articulate, you know, various kinds of works one has for credentialing systems, for processes of tenure. I certainly had my own challenges here at UCLA around a lot of that. But I think that's changing. And I hope that the book adds, I guess, to that change and enables those ways of making.
Daniel Scott Snelson:I I know that it's I I don't know if I'm pushing too far in that direction. Like, you know, my colleague, Johanna Drucker, she keeps her academic work and her poetry completely different. And and she says, you know, she doesn't want any of her colleagues to know about her creative writing and and vice versa. And so I kind of am curious, I feel like I've been a perverse reader of Craig's for a long time. I read this amazing chapbook that he wrote, Signature Effects, as an index of Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus, like my first time reading A Thousand Plateaus, which I know you're interested in as well, Wiki.
Daniel Scott Snelson:It was through this weird little book of poems that Craig had written that kind of exerted from the text. But I don't know if you think of that as a kind of, Craig, you have a prolific academic writing practice as well as a prolific experimental writing practice. I'm thinking of works like Strand or Parse in particular that take these paraacademic spaces. But I'm curious how you think about, I guess, the I don't know, is calling those works scholarly in some way wrong for you? Is that something you want to try and keep at an arm's length?
Daniel Scott Snelson:Or how do you think about those practices?
Craig Dworkin:Well, I mean, unlike the rest of you, know, my my scholarly work is is not creative. It's really it's tedious and scholarly and academic in all the bad ways. But the perverse paracademic creative books and the boring, tedious academic articles often start from exactly the same place. I'm a little embarrassed that you found that book, which is, you know, all over the place. But I'll say two quick things about it.
Craig Dworkin:One is that it goes back to questions of technology and obsolescence. It was composed on a pirated copy of what was already then an outdated version of Aldus PageMaker. I was trained on letterpress. I was trained to handset metal type and ink it up because you could do things that you couldn't do in word processing programs at the time, like WordPerfect, which is what I'd been typing my papers on. And Aldis was this way of doing this is a book that reads down through the z axis of of the page.
Craig Dworkin:It would have been terrible pain to try and get the registration right if I were printing this on a on on the Vandercook. So Aldis was great for that. And I think it's the opposite of continuing to hand type HTML into plain text files. I should get whatever our version of Aldis is and make my life easier and cleaner. But the other point about the academic part is, I just completed what the scholarly version of what that book began as, which was trying to think about Stephane Malamais, Jean Caudadet, and what it would mean to read and compose by the sheet rather than the bound page.
Craig Dworkin:And so as I started thinking about that thirty years ago, however long ago that was, one version is this kind of terrible chapbook that's trying to do too much. But I've just now finished the other part of that, which is thinking about page space in the Stavusian Qatarian way via Mallarme's printing and binding practices. So they start in the same place, but I think they're they're pretty siloed for me, I have to admit.
Daniel Scott Snelson:That's great. That leads into I feel like I'm just gonna voice my concerns about the book with everyone. So if on one hand, you know, I'm concerned with thinking about this argument around creative scholarship in the book and what it affords or or or doesn't, I'm also really interested in in trying to connect these collections online like Eclipse and Google Web and PenSound to personal hard drives. On one level, I'm I'm trying to look through these publicly accessible collections, which to my mind really mirror how my personal hard drive is is produced. These old websites and Craig or anyone who spent a lot of time in those file hierarchies writing those pages by hand, it's just a series of, like, files and folders that that one nests, just like we all do with our own hard drives and personal data collections.
Daniel Scott Snelson:As we're beginning to to maybe wrap up, I'm I'm interested to hear, one, if you see your own personal collections reflected in some of these online collections, or two, yeah, how you're thinking about downloading right now in general or or having personal collection. As book collectors, film collectors, we have, like, a lot of material artifacts. But are personal hard drives the same kind of thing? Are they are they something quite different? What is your relationship to your personal hard drive?
Daniel Scott Snelson:And otherwise, if that's not too bold of me to ask.
Vicki Bennett:I have so many hard drives that all the cataloging is completely futile at this point. And people keep saying, oh, you know, you could make a server. But then I think, well, if it's all joined together, it might all just die one day. So I keep all these bits separately and I've got about 50 hard drives. But yeah, I download everything still, even though I know it's available in places, because I don't trust that it will be tomorrow in the places that I look again.
Vicki Bennett:I mean, instance, I use Anna's archive to get all of my PDFs. And I love PDFs and they're tactile to me. I love seeing the scans and the colours and reading them in that way. But I don't want to just stream stuff. I kind of want to have it in my house and if I could I'll put it in a vault somewhere.
Vicki Bennett:When something becomes less popular it will disappear. In the same way that when you look at video archives on Pirate Bay, even a TV series will disappear. That might have been really important but no one wanted to share it anymore. So yeah, I grab everything and I download everything and I keep it myself. And when I get a new hard drive I copy it across again in case the hard drive stops working with the operating system.
Vicki Bennett:So I'm working with the obsolete the whole time and there's no hope in hell that I'm ever going to read all these books. We know that isn't why we do it. Why do we do it? Why? I don't know, you say.
Daniel Scott Snelson:It is. Some guard against erasure in the future. You're you're right. And, you know, I'm thinking also of, Vint Cerf's statement that if, you know, if you wanna preserve anything, if you wanna preserve a photo Vint Cerf, of course, the founder of the Internet, provocatively said, like, you have to print it out. Otherwise, you know, if it's on a hard drive, it will die, will disappear.
Daniel Scott Snelson:And and and that's one of the the the things that I find so inspiring about these collections is that they often disappear. Like, they'll they'll crash or or, you know, a server will go down or a university will will will oust you from their servers. And it requires just a massive amount of these, like, repertoires of of care, of of downloading, of re uploading, of maintenance, these these kinds of, like, smaller activities that I think are, like, less flashy than just sort of, like, posting something online, but but are actually just a lot of labor and and a lot of time and and and care. And I know that's something that you also think about, Luca, in in your work and thinking about labor, especially in relationship to contingency and and academe. What is your personal hard drive like?
Daniel Scott Snelson:And and what kind of labors does it invoke?
Luca Messarra:My personal hard drive is an absolute mess. I would say that it is a collection of folders that just say desktop dump, and it's usually everything that was on my desktop at the time. And I throw it into a folder, and I throw it on a hard drive, and that's pretty much it. There is no other good organization for it at all. But that said, these are the repertoires that I think are absolutely essential if we want things to continue existing, as you were saying, Vicky.
Luca Messarra:And it's something that I kind of advocate a lot for in the report is for people to have their own little databases that they keep on their hard drives so that one day, when these things that we think of as too big to fail, like the Internet Archive, which very well might fail one day, we don't know for sure, because of the lawsuits that they're facing, There will be this rhizome of people, of Cedars, who have continued to maintain their little databases, and then they'll upload the materials again one day and they'll sprout out and people will have them again. At least that's the utopian vision, right? But I also think it's also a true vision if we think about the history of sharing digital files over time. This is a separate thing, but I want to really quickly cut it in because we brought up the Internet Archive. One of the deciding factors in the Internet Archive versus Hatchet case was the question of whether or not a scan of a book was sufficiently transformative of a publisher's book in order to make it not a copyright infringement for the Internet Archive to do.
Luca Messarra:So the Internet Archive had scanned all these books that were technically still commercially available, and they had made them available through controlled digital lending. And publishers, Hatchet and other big groups sued and said that this was copyright infringement. And the court failed to recognize that there is some fundamental transformation that happens when you scan a physical book. Craig, I'm sure you understand this as well, somebody who does Eclipse. These are fundamentally different objects, the physical book, the scan of the physical book and a publisher's ebook.
Luca Messarra:And the court failed to recognize that. And as a result, there's been like a great blow against both the internet archive and the accessibility and availability of digital resources more broadly. So there are like these very real political stakes to the kind of work that you're doing, Danny, where you're paying close attention to file types and formats. Not the least because if we don't pay attention to them, then courts might not pay attention to them. And that means down the line that people don't have access to them across the world.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Oh, that's really nice. Yeah. I think that's one just so true and so important. And of course, access is is always a challenge. Right?
Daniel Scott Snelson:These paradoxical vicissitudes that digital culture is subject to where they they build the same corporate entities that they're attempting to resist. These shadow libraries and and Joe Cargatis and and others have written about, you know, quite a bit about how important that is, say, for the global South to be able to access or or anyone actually outside of institutional bodies that have access to things like JSTOR to to be able to do research and be able to access these kinds of materials. It goes in both directions. I think just taking those those transformative effects seriously. And on one hand, was thinking, yeah, the, like, transformative effects are really strong argument for the least the way the Supreme Court has litigated copyright around transformation, especially if it comes to media specific works.
Daniel Scott Snelson:But otherwise, I I I kind of have avoided a lot of those questions of copyright in the book just because I feel like so many of these conversations about these digital materials often just boil down to copyright and that they have these, like, rich, meaningful lives outside of just those moments. I'm I'm even just thinking about desktop dump. One, would love to see what what's in that folder. It might be a great that's a great idea for, like, I don't know, like, digital magazine that's just desktop dump that that releases these desktops. And and you see a lot.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Like, I feel, you know, every desktop is also a kind of memoir or or a kind of autobiography and and, you know, more akin to, say, like, a writer's library than than anything else we might have at present. Speaking of which, because I know that, Craig, you think about libraries and you also stay so organized. I've always been curious. I mean, Eclipse is is meticulously organized on the back end. Do your own personal hard drives mirror Eclipse?
Daniel Scott Snelson:Or conversely, does has Eclipse always mirrored your own personal hard drives?
Craig Dworkin:No. They're much closer to the dump. I'm like Vicky. I I back up the backups of the the backups because they do I mean, as we know from Eclipse, the CDs, that contain the original scans have already deteriorated in what looked like they were going to be the archive of the archive has already crumbled. So this is not a paranoid fear.
Craig Dworkin:It's just what happens even to the gel inside those CDs. But let me just make a plug for the adjacent conversation that memory of the world has had around amateur librarianship, which is one way. I like the shadow archive arguments, but I think the case they make for everyone being an amateur librarian, which is is just just corroborating what Luca said, is is very rhetorically very powerful.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Excellent. Yeah. And thinking about Memory of the World, Anna's archive, which also I think what makes Anna's archive so great is that they have, like, rich metadata finally, right? That you can like, the searches are accurate, the titles are accurate. Like, there's an enormous amount of work to make it highly functional, to to make a space for for users that's also supported by the community.
Daniel Scott Snelson:It's one of so many shadow libraries and and these kinds of collections that I didn't get to write about in the book, like a book is a bounded thing. And as much as I wanted to, like, radiate out into all these various source materials, there there's only so much that I could access. So as we wrap up this podcast, I I thought maybe just as one last question, and this is inspired a little bit maybe by by Al Bill Rees, who always ends his podcasts with a a gathering paradise, a chance for everyone to just point to something that either you want to plug, if there's, like, weird or unlikely or favorite little databases that you might have that are worth mentioning or any other work. For my part, the middle of Not Equals, which is currently up on Eclipse archive, but thanks to Craig, transforms what what Language Magazine used to do is list all the other little magazines that that were running, and and they would be very hard to find in these kind of underground Xerox networks of experimental writers. You would get the the name of the editor, the address, the cost, and you'd able to write to purchase a copy directly from those editors.
Daniel Scott Snelson:In my updated version, I I produced a list of a few dozen little databases that I wish I had a chance to write about. So I I will direct potential listeners to that section of the not equals language project. And I think as I I put it in the book, little databases that might be able to test some of the arguments that I'm trying to make or even better refute them or or resist them in ways that that I can't imagine. I'm I'm so grateful for this conversation. I I wish that I feel like there's already dozens of things that I I wanna follow-up with each of you on after our official recorded space.
Daniel Scott Snelson:But perhaps we can make just one last round if there's anything that you would like to plug or point to before we bid our listeners adieu.
Luca Messarra:I'd like to shout out the Future Knowledge podcast that's ongoing right now with the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance. Anybody who's interested in learning more about issues of contemporary copyright could check that out. It's rolling out and it's really good.
Craig Dworkin:Also saying that it's maybe going to seem unrelated, but I think is actually deeply related to what we've been talking about, which is a book by Rory McCartney and Charlie Morgan called Searching for Mysterious Typefaces, the cultural history of faux, black letter, iron on letterforms that were part of youth culture in the '70s. And I'll leave the obliquity there, but everyone should read it anyway.
Vicki Bennett:Okay, I've got one. It's not brand new, but it's not that old. In Praise of Copying, Marcus Boone. I've got so many bookmarks in that book. It's just a great inspiration and I like the way he ties it in with Buddhist thinking as well, which is something I've not mentioned.
Vicki Bennett:But so much of my thinking comes from non duality and interconnectedness. So Marcus Boone, In Praise of Copying.
Daniel Scott Snelson:Wonderful. Well, thank you all. And I'll just conclude by sending my heartfelt thanks and, and and plugging and pointing to the the works that that all three of you continue to make, and continue to inspire my own practice. This has been a a real delight to be able to join you in conversation, and, wanna extend, gratitude also to the University of Minnesota Press and in particular Margaret Sattler for helping us record and produce this podcast. Thank you for listening.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book, The Little Database, A Poetics of Media Formats, is available from University of Minnesota Press. It is also available in an open access edition at manafold.umn.edu. Thank you for listening.