The general structure of this book, building on a PhD at Penn, is as conventional as it may be, with an introduction, four case study based chapters, and an epilog, all packed in the no less conventional length of a 228 pages publication. Yet this editorial packaging is probably the only conventional element of the whole book. The work itself is scholarly amazing and truly avantgarde, not in its writing, very didactic and fluent to read even for readers less familiar with the technical aspects of online, either digitized or digital-born art and literature, but in its take on an essential but understudied collections and its defense of a different way of scrutinizing the online websites that host them.

The theoretical and methodological innovations of Snelson’s work are undoubtedly linked to the author’s profile, which combines the best of two worlds: that of in-depth academic training (Snelson’s PhD was supervised by Charles Bernstein and the author has also worked intensively with Craig Dworkin, among others), and that of a hands-on experience of the material at the center of this study, since the author has worked as an editor for each of the four “little databases” he analyzes: Textz, a no longer active site (created in 2001, closed in 2004) edited by German net artist Sebastian Lütgert gathering all kind of texts in ASCII format and exploring the dynamics of encoding/decoding of analog material opened to various types of digital remediation; Eclipse, the facsimile collection of rare and out-of-print experimental poetry and poetics founded by Craig Dworkin in 2003, which raises fascinating questions of transcodification as well as distribution as so many others, the site, today still accessible in a very stable environment, has longtime been moved from one server to another); the PennSound collection, founded by Charles Bernstein and Al Filreis in 2005, specialized in poetry recordings but mixing various types of file formats; and UbuWeb, the platform for all digitizable media types of Modern and Avant-Garde works founded by Kenneth Goldsmith in 1996 (still online but currently -temporarily?- no longer expanded). The epilog zooms in on EPC (Loss Pequeño Glazier’s Electronic Poetry Center, founded in 1994 at the University of Buffalo, a pioneering yet rapidly abandoned website whose very imperfections for today’s users will help Snelson to make a brilliant wrapping up of his argumentation.

Not unlike what happens in the field of periodical studies with the “little magazine” (one could add here the notion of “little archive” as coined by the German researches Gustav Frank and Madleen Podewski, also elaborated in the framework of periodical studies), [1] the concept of “little database” is much more than just the reduced or smaller version of what we define as a database (the main theoretical reference here is Lev Manovich’s distinction, nowadays much nuanced, between database and narrative). Rather than referring to a miniature version of “big”, “little” means something completely different. A little database may contain a large number of data (Eclipse, PennSound, UbuWeb are “huge”, even if they are incomparably small in comparison with really big archives), but their structure and organization are not like those of conventional databases. Granted, little databases fulfill the two essential functions of any archive whatsoever: preservation and access. They thus gather material they consider worth saving for oneself and others, while they also try to be as accessible as possible (easy to use and with no paywall, etc.). Yet it is the differences with other databases that are key. Little databases are “rogue” archives, to use the now well-established term proposed by Abigal De Kosnik in her eponymous book (MIT Press, 2016). They are grassroots initiatives, which do not have the aim to gather and preserve material whose importance is determined by other agents and institutions than the archivists themselves and to perform this job according to officially accepted archival rules and standards. Their aim is not only to keep traces of something (in this case of material ignored or discarded by official archives while highly appreciated by the amateur-archivists)  but also to transform the field in which they intervene (to build a little archive is part of a larger creative commitment to nonmainstream cultural production).

In the case of the digital little archives studies by Snelson, this approach has crucial consequences. First of all, the very making of a little database is a hands-on effort to invent and implement a new logic of collection, rather than an attempt to reconcile an initially “rogue” initiative with the demands of the conventional database. As a matter of fact, it is a task that opens the possibility of all kinds of experimentations that change at the same time the material itself (the notion of rematerialization and the transformative impact of it on the archived document are a central concern of Snelson’s study). Second, the intended use of little archives goes far beyond the classic work of retrieval and subsequent more or less statistical analysis, if possible based on the quantitative bid data methods that are increasingly promoted as the new standard. A combination of various elements (archives like these are too small, the material they host is both heterogeneous and heterogeneously organized, many elements are technically “corrupt”, copyright questions are not always solved, etc.) makes that little archives resist computational analysis as well as legal academic admission and reuse. Instead, they make room for other types of analysis based on close and extremely slow reading methods and the necessity of actively interpreting the archived items and functions in until now undreamt-of ways. In other words: if little archives cannot deliver material for “significant data analytics or statistical insight” (p. 2), they make us aware of the fact that the meaning of their collection resides elsewhere, not in the objects themselves, but in the manifold ways old and new media artefacts are permanently reshaped and modified by the little archive that rematerializes them, on the one hand, and in the equally diverse ways in which users appropriate them, on the other hand. For Snelson, both aspects are also characteristic of the larger shifts from analog to digital culture: “This is the fundamental challenge that software poses to literary study: all potential instances of transformation overcome the actualized us of the script on any given text” (p. 47). Hence the double necessity of practicing what Snelson calls, following Jerome McGann, contingent and highly intertextual (and intermedial) reading, as well as foregrounding questions of distribution (accessibility, reuse, community-building), in ways that are lightyears away from Google analytics of Facebook friends.

The technical difficulties that little databases raise to conventional analytical methods are then less an obstacle than the opportunity of exploring two new perspectives. On the one hand, the imperfections and permanent changes of little archives allow (but it may be safer to say that they trigger) a reflection on the new media materiality of the collected sites. A little archive is not a window on some more or less forgotten past, but a pathway to unimagined new ways of thinking and doing. Snelson pays here a well-deserved tribute to the mediapoetical work of scholars such as Katherine N. Hayles, Lev Manovich and Jerome McGann, among many others. On the other hand, it also underscores the radically open, collective and social dimension of this hermeneutical work, which pushes Snelson to link the mediapoetical dimension, that is the focus on the mutual influence of media-specific formats and innovative media creation, and sociopoetics, that is “a field wherein the networked circulation of aesthetic products assumes a privileged status that exceeds the works themselves” (p. 27). Snelson’s book thus pays great attention to the never unproblematic but always challenging and inspiring moves from the initial status of the collected works to their digitized and regularly changing versions in little databases. The author is particularly sensitive to the “negative” aspects of these changes, as shown in his final presentation of EPC, a kind of “ghost”  whose countless technical imperfections and dead ends, glitches, broken links,  404 error messages, etc. provide many new insights on how the material as well as hermeneutic aspects of the little database content (the collected works) and infrastructure (the software and the hardware) are in permanent interaction, not only in “dead” or abandoned websites (as part of the tremendous amount of junk that litters the internet) but also and even more in new or updated sites.

The Little Database is an important publication. It 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. It strongly contributes to a deepening of new media poetics and media materialism in a way that fruitfully complements media archeology. Snelson’s emphasis on the most minute details of the material life and afterlife of digitized or digital-born material succeeds in simultaneously highlighting the role of users, individuals as well as communities, and their commitment to critical inquiry and collaborative creation. While stressing the antagonism between “little” and “big” archives, the book eventually dissolves the boundaries between the traditionally sharply separated levels or scales of item and collection, but this could also be read as the beginning of Snelson’s enterprise: “If there is anything to be learned from the sites examines in The Little Database, it is that any text may also contain a collection” (p. 103).

Notes

[1] See their article “The Object of Periodical Studies”, in Periodical Studies Today, issue 1 (2022), available in open access: 1 The Object of Periodical Studies in: Periodical Studies Today.